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CAPITALIST    AND 
LABORER 

An  Open  Letter  to  Professor  Goldwin  Smith,  D.  C.  L., 
in  reply  to  his  Capital  and  Labor, 

AND 

MODERN  SOCIALISM 

A  Lecture  delivered  at  the  New  York  School  of  Phil- 
anthrophy 


BY 

JOHN  SPARGO 

Author  of  "  The  Bitter  Cry  of  the  Children,"  "  Social- 
ism, a  Summary  and  Interpretation  of  Socialist 
Principles,"    "  The    Socialists,"   etc. 


CHICAGO 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY 

1907 


Copyrig-ht  1907 
By  CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY 


JOHN  F.  HI&GINS 
CBIC4G0 


TO 

CFiUSE  E.    A.   CARMAN 

WITH    PROFOUND   ADMIRATION   AND   SINCERE   FRIENDSHIP 


CO 

ci 

=3 


450128 


PREFACE 

This  little  volume  consists  of  two  parts. 
The  first  part  contains  a  reply  to  Professor 
Goldwin  Smith's  attack  on  Socialism  in  his 
little  book,  Capital  and  Labor,  the  second  a  lec- 
ture on  Modern  Socialism,  delivered  to  the 
students  of  the  School  of  Philanthrophy,  New 
York  City. 

It  will  be  seen  that,  while  I  have  for  Pro- 
fessor Smith's  character  and  scholastic  attain- 
ments the  highest  respect  and  admiration,  I 
cannot  esteem  other  than  lightly  his  argu- 
ment on  the  relations  of  Capital  and  Labor. 
Had  the  author's  eminence  in  the  world  of 
letters  not  been  such  that  his  words  are  given 
great  and  serious  attention  wherever  the  Eng- 
lish language  is  read  and  spoken,  I  should 
not  have  felt  that  his  little  book  merited  any 
reply. 

As  it  is,  I  venture  to  ask  a  careful  consider- 
ation of  the  reply  here  printed,  especially 
5 


6  PREFACE 

from  those  who  have  read  Professor  Smith's 
book. 

The  lecture  in  the  second  part  of  the  vol- 
ume is  here  included  in  the  belief  that  such 
a  brief  expository  statement  will  be  welcomed 
by  many  persons,  and  that  it  usefully  supple- 
ments the  arguments  contained  in  the  earlier 
portion.  A  certain  amount  of  repetition  oc- 
curs, but  not,  I  hope,  sufficient  to  annoy  the 
reader. 

Perhaps  I  ought  to  say  that,  owing  to  the 
time  limits,  the  lecture  as  originally  delivered 
was  considerably  abbreviated.  It  is  here  pub- 
lished for  the  first  time. 

J.  S. 

Yonkers,  N.  Y.,  March,  1907. 


PART  ONE 

CAPITALIST  AND  LABORER 

An  Open  Letter  to  Prof.  Goldwin  Smith, 
D.C.L. 


z 


CAPITALIST  AND   LABORER 

My  Dear  Professor  Smith: 

iteasonsfor  Somc  time  ago  a  friend  in  Tor- 
this  letter        ^^^^^   ^^^^^   ^^^  ^  copy  of   a   little 

pamphlet  containing  your  "  open  letter," 
Progress  or  Revolution  i'  with  the  request  that 
I  reply  to  it  from  the  viewpoint  of  those  mem- 
bers of  the  working  class  who  believe  the  ex- 
isting industrial  system  to  be  unjust  and  des- 
tined to  be  replaced  by  a  saner  and  juster 
system.  While  I  was  reluctant  to  associate 
my  name  in  a  controversial  w^ay  with  that  of 
so  eminent  a  citizen  in  the  great  republic  of 
letters,  wherein  I  am  so  humble  a  citizen,  as 
yourself,  I  could  not  but  feel  emboldened  by 
the  terms  of  friendship  for  Labor  in  which 
your  letter  was  couched.  Further,  it  seeme^ 
to  me  a  matter  of  duty  to  set  forth  my  rea- 
sons for  believing  that  Progress  must  be  by 
Revolution  —  albeit  that  the  revolution  need 
not  be  associated  with  violence.     I   felt  that 

9 


lO  CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER 

the  manner  in  which  your  letter  had  come 
under  my  observation  was  in  a  very  real  sense 
a  call  to  give  reasons  for  the  faith  and  hope 
which,  as  a  Socialist,  I  hold.  It  did  not  re- 
quire even  your  very  modest  references  to 
your  many  services  to  the  cause  of  the  work- 
ers in  years  past,  and  your  friendship  for  men 
like  Joseph  Arch  and  George  Jacob  Holy- 
oake  —  men  whom  I  also  knew  and  loved  — 
to  assure  me  that  you  would  give  my  letter 
of  reply  the  same  courteous  consideration  as 
that  which  you  desired  for  your  letter  which 
called  it  forth. 

That  reply  to  Progress  or  Revolution  was 
written,  under  the  title  Progress  by  Revolu- 
tion, and  but  for  pressure  of  other  matters 
of  more  immediate  importance  would  have 
been  published  some  time  ago.  Now  that 
your  letter  has  appeared  in  a  new  and  greatly 
revised  edition,  and  with  the  imprint  of  an 
American  publisher,  I  am  grateful  for  the 
delay,  since  it  affords  me  the  opportunity  of 
replying  to  your  argument  in  its  elaborated 
and  carefully  revised  form.  I  have  taken  the 
liberty,  therefore,  of  changing  the  title  of  my 
reply  to  one  conforming  more  nearly  to  the 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  II 

one  you  have  substituted  for  that  of  your  orig- 
inal choice. 

That   in   a   life   so  crowded   with 

A  correction  .     ,  ,  •    • ,  •  i     •    , 

varied  activities  and  interests  as 
your  own  the  memory  should  sometimes  falter 
and  fail  is  quite  natural.  It  would  be  strange 
were  it  otherwise.  Your  well-known  love  of 
historical  accuracy  will,  I  am  confident,  cause 
you  to  welcome  a  correction  I  desire  to  make 
before  proceeding  to  a  consideration  of  your 
general  argument,  even  though  it  adds  some- 
what to  the  length  of  my  letter  and  leads  into 
a  bypath  from  which  we  must  retrace  our 
steps. 

After  referring  to  the  historical  case  of  the 
•transportation  of  the  six  (not  seven  as  you 
state)  Dorchester  laborers,  you  say,  "  Liber- 
alism coming  into  power  in  England  repealed 
the  Combination  Laws."  ^  May  I  remind 
you  that  the  act  repealing  the  odious  law  of 
1800,  which  prohibited  workmen's  combina- 
tions, was  passed  in  1824  —  ten  years  before 
the  vicious  persecution  of  the  Dorchester  la- 
borers, to  which  you  refer,  and  of  the  Ber- 
mondsey  tanners.  It  was  not  passed  by  the 
'^Capital  and  Labor,  p.  11. 


12  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

Liberals.  It  was,  as  you  will  remember, 
"  smuggled  "  through  Parliament  by  its  au- 
thors, the  philosophic  radicals,  Francis  Place 
and  Joseph  Hume,  so  that  the  Tory  govern- 
ment of  the  time  was  quite  unaware  of  its 
passage.  Three  weeks  after  the  act  went  into 
effect  some  cotton  weavers  in  Lancashire  were 
sent  to  jail  under  the  old  law,  the  magistrates 
never  having  heard  of  its  repeal.  The  Prime 
Minister  and  the  Lord  Chancellor  declared  a 
year  afterward  that  they  had  been  "  quite  un- 
aware of  the  passing  of  the  Act,"  and  that 
had  they  been  informed  concerning  it  they 
"  never  would  have  assented  to  it."  An  at- 
tempt was  accordingly  made,  in  1825,  to  undo 
the  work  of  Place  and  Hume.  Some  modifi- 
cations were  made  in  the  Act  of  Repeal  of 
1824,  but  the  result  of  the  Tory  legislation 
was,  upon  the  whole,  satisfactory.  The  rights 
of  combination  and  collective  bargaining  were 
for  the  first  time  in  English  history  specific- 
ally established  by  statute,  and  that  by  the 
Tories.^ 

1  The  History  of  Trade  Unionism,  by  Sidney  and  Be- 
atrice Webb. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  1 3 

p^J'^d^      In  183O'  the  Liberals  — so  called 

Trade  Umon-       j^^      ^1^^      ^^.^^      ^j^^^  Came       llltO 

power  under  that  hater  of  democracy  and  lib- 
erty, Lord  Melbourne.  As  soon  as  he  had 
taken  office,  Melbourne  appointed  a  Commis- 
sion to  inquire  into  the  workings  of  the  trade 
unions,  which  he  regarded  as  "  a  very  formid- 
able difficulty  and  danger."  ^  Before  me  as 
I  write  is  the  volume  of  Lord  Melbourne's 
papers  which  Mr.  Lloyd  C.  Sanders  edited. 
From  it  alone  the  justice  of  my  estimate  of 
Lord  Melbourne  could  be  easily  justified. 
That  his  two  Commissioners  were  appointed 
mainly  because  they  were  already  known  to 
be  bitterly  hostile  to  the  trade  unions  is  well 
known  to  every  student  of  the  subject.  They 
reported  in  favor  of  terrible  measures  of  re- 
pression in  a  report  so  vicious  that  Lord  Mel- 
bourne's government  dared  not  even  present 
it  to  the  House  of  Commons,  much  less  try 
to  embody  its  proposals  in  legislation. 
Nevertheless,  Lord  Melbourne  and  his  Cabi- 
net decided  to  carry  on  a  campaign  of  perse- 
cution against  the  unions.  I  need  only  men- 
tion here  the  imprisonment  of  the  Lancashire 
^  History  of  Trade  Unionism,  Webb. 


14  CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER 

miners  and  the  Southwark  shoemakers,  ir 
1832,  and  the  already  mentioned  tanners  o: 
Bermondsey  and  laborers  of  Dorchester,  ir 
1834.^  Any  uninformed  person  reading  youi 
statement  would  naturally  gather  from  it  tha 
the  Liberals  were  the  friends  of  trade  union 
ism  and  its  emancipators,  whereas  they  wer< 
in  fact  its  bitterest  enemies. 
Unions  legal-  It  was  left  for  the  Tories  to  re 
Tories'  licvc  the  uuious,   by  the  Acts  o 

1859  and  1 86 1,  They  definitely  legalizec 
unionism  and  the  use  of  peaceful,  persuasiv( 
methods  of  inducing  non-unionists  to  join  th( 
unions  —  picketing.  Again  the  Liberals,  un 
der  Gladstone  this  time,  showed  their  hostil 
ity  to  organized  Labor  by  passing  th( 
infamous  Criminal  Law  Amendment  Act,  th( 
most  cruel  measure  ever  directed  against  Eng 
lish  trade  unions.  You  will  remember  hov 
Mr.  Frederic  Harrison  drew  up  a  bill  for  th( 
unions,  embodying  the  proposals  of  the  Mi 
nority  Report  of  the  Royal  Commission  whicl 
the  Earl  of  Lichfield,  Mr.  Thomas  Hughe: 
and  himself  had  signed.  You  will  remember 
too,  how  bitterly  that  bill  was  opposed  by  th( 
1  Idem. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  1 5 

government  and  how  it  was  subsequently 
withdrawn  upon  the  promise  of  Mr.  Glad- 
stone's government  that  another  bill,  satisfac- 
tory to  the  unions,  would  be  speedily  intro- 
duced. When  that  measure  was  tardily 
introduced,  in  1871,  by  Mr.  Bruce,  who  after- 
ward became  Lord  Aberdare,  it  roused  the 
fiercest  storm  of  opposittion  on  the  part  of  the 
unions  ever  directed  against  any  measure,  so 
that  the  bill  had  to  be  divided.  Two  laws 
were  passed,  one  of  which  (34  and  35  Vic- 
toria, C.  31)  legalized  trade  unionism,  and 
the  other  of  which,  the  Criminal  Law  Amend- 
ment Act  (34  and  35  Victoria,  C.  32),  well 
nigh  destroyed  the  unions.^ 
virions  per-      Do  vou   forgct,   Profcssor  Smith, 

Hwntion  of  ,  .  .  ,  r       ii 

Unionists  tlic  imprisoumcut  01  the  seven 
women  in  South  Wales  for  shouting  "  Bah !  " 
after  a  "  blackleg,"  ^  or  the  sentence  of  im- 
prisonment passed  upon  the  London  gas-stok- 
ers, in  1872,  by  Lord  Justice  Brett,  merely  for 
preparing  to  strike F  Do  you  forget  the  vig- 
orous opposition  to  the  iniquitous  law  carried 

'  History  of  Trade  Unionism,  Webb. 
-  Idem  "  Blackleg  "  is  the  English  equivalent  for  the 
American  term  of  contempt  and  reproach,  "  Scab." 


1 6  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

on  by  Mr.  Frederic  Harrison  in  his  trenchant 
letters  to  the  Times,  and  the  campaign  of  such 
men  as  Messrs.  Potter,  Howell,  Broadhurst, 
and  others?  In  1874  the  Liberals  went  out  of 
office  with  the  curse  of  the  trade  unions  upon 
them,  and  it  was  left  to  the  Tories  once  more 
to  do  justice  to  the  workers.^  In  1875  Mr. 
Cross  introduced  legislation,  which  was  car- 
ried in  the  teeth  of  strong  Liberal  opposition, 
repealing  the  Criminal  Law  Amendment  Act 
of  1 87 1,  and  making  employer  and  employee 
equal  parties  to  a  civil  contract.  This  was 
the  real  charter  of  English  trade  unionism, 
hailed  as  such  by  the  Trade  Union  Congress 
of  1875,  which  voted  its  thanks  to  Mr.  Cross. ^ 
Sources  of  I  havc  far  too  much  respect  for 
evidence  your  splendid  integrity  as  a  his- 

torian to  regard  your  version  of  the  attitude 
of  the  English  Liberal  Party  toward  the  trade 
unions  as  anything  other  than  a  mistake  aris- 
ing from  a  confused  memory  of  a  not  very 
familiar  phase  of  history.  That  the  facts  are 
as  I  have  briefly  stated  them,  you  can  easily 
satisfy  yourself  by  referring  to  the  authorities 
I  have  cited,  to  the  reports  of  the  Trade  Union 
''^  History  of  Trade  Unionism,  Webb. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  -    IJ 

Congress  of  the  period,  the  files  of  the  Lon- 
don Times,  the  various  volumes  of  Hansard's 
Parliamentary  Debates,  or  by  asking  Mr. 
Frederic  Harrison  for  the  part  in  which  he 
was  a  distinguished  participant.  Elsewhere, 
I  have  shown,  beyond  the  possibility  of  seri- 
ous doubt,  I  think,  that  the  Liberal  Party  in 
England  always  was  the  most  bitter  opponent 
of  industrial  democracy.^  I  cannot  but  feel 
that  it  is  a  very  great  pity  that  a  man  of  your 
eminence  and  distinction,  upon  whose  every 
word  so  much  reliance  is  placed,  should  have 
sown  broadcast  such  error  as  your  references 
to  the  history  of  English  trade  unionism  con- 
tain. It  is  not  a  matter  for  wonder  that  this 
Homeric  nodding  weakens  confidence  in  your 
other  judgments  and  your  advice  to  the  work- 
ers. 

A  challenge  ^  P'^^s  uow  to  the  general  argu- 
accepted  ^^^^  ^^  ^^^^^  1^^.^^^.  ^j^j^h  is  de- 

signed, obviously,  to  serve  as  an  intellectual 
weapon  to  be  used  by  the  opponents  of  Social- 
ism in  their  desperate  and  pathetic  propa- 
ganda.    Temperate  anrl   kindly  in   tone  as  it 

'  In  the  Social   Democrat,  London,  October   1900,  p. 
294. 


l8  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

is,  it  commands  respectful  attention  whatever 
its  weakness  may  be,  and  quite  apart  from 
the  homage  due  to  yourself.  Since  you  have 
sent  it  forth  as  a  challenge  to  the  Socialists, 
challenging  them  in  very  definite  terms,  you 
will  not,  I  am  sure,  complain  if  I,  a  Socialist 
to  whom  Socialism  is  an  inspiration  and  spirit- 
ual anchorage,  take  it  upon  myself  to  answer 
your  challenge  and  discuss  the  remainder  of 
your  letter  with  perfect  frankness  and  plain 
speech. 
Anincom-        When   I   read   in  your  letter  the 

piete  state-  -^ 

ment  declaration    that    "  It    would    be 

hard  to  require  the  employer  to  live  in  the 
smoke  and  din  of  his  works,"  ^  I  could  not 
see  my  way  clear  to  accepting  it.  Something 
about  it  seemed  wrong:  the  statement  seemed 
incomplete.  I  would  not  want  the  employer 
to  live  "  in  the  smoke  and  din  of  his  works," 
simply  because  the  employer  is  a  human  be- 
ing like  myself.  But  I  submit  that  the  em- 
ployer is  not  more  than  human,  that  dirt  and 
din  are  just  as  unpleasant,  unwholesome  and 
unhealthy  to  the  men  and  women  who  work 
as  to  those  for  whom  they  work.  It  is  both 
'^Page  3. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  1 9 

hard  and  wrong  that  any  human  being  should 
be  doomed  to  Hve  in  such  unfavorable  condi- 
tions. I  have  visited  and  slept  in  scores  of 
miserable  "  Company  houses  "  in  our  mining 
districts,  squalid,  ill-built,  unsanitary  and 
monstrously  ugly  houses  built  by  the  employ- 
ing companies  for  their  *'  hands  "  and  their 
families  to  dwell  in.  I  have  lived  in  vile  tene- 
ment hovels  in  our  greatest  cities,  hovels  in 
which  tens  of  thousands  of  families  are  com- 
pelled to  reside,  and  in  which  thousands  of 
babies  are  born  under  conditions  less  favorable 
to  proper  physical  and  spiritual  development 
than  they  would  have  if  born  in  Africa  in  the 
hut  of  a  kaffir  kraal.  That  such  things  are 
necessary,  I  cannot  believe.  I  cannot  think 
that  they  are  due  to  anything  but  Ignorance 
and  Greed.  I  would  not  condemn  the  em- 
ployer to  such  a  struggle  against  unwholesome 
environment  as  these  conditions  inevitably  im- 
pose upon  their  victims,  nor  can  I  believe  it  to 
be  anything  less  than  my  duty  as  a  man  and 
citizen  to  do  all  that  lies  in  my  power  to  make 
it  impossible  for  such  evils  to  continue. 
pwiHimJ^m  What  most  surprises  and  pains  me 
and  iniideiity    j^  your  letter  is  uot  the  conserva- 


20  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

tism  due  to  advancing  age,  which  you  recog- 
nize with  philosophic  calm,  but  the  lack  of 
idealism,  of  moral  energy,  faith  and  courage, 
so  unusual  in  your  brilliant  and  honored  ca- 
reer. Realizing  that  the  Socialist  ideal  of 
human  brotherhood  means  "  social  happiness 
compared  with  which  the  highest  pleasure  at- 
tainable in  this  world  of  inequality,  strife,  and 
self-interest  would  be  mean,"  ^  you  seek  to 
pour  cold  water,  the  deadening  cold  water  of 
pessimism  and  infidelity,  upon  whatever  en- 
thusiasm and  faith  manifests  itself  in  the  pur- 
suit of  the  great  ideal.  Many  of  your  read- 
ers must,  I  think,  like  myself,  have  asked 
themselves,  "  Is  it  ever  possible  to  be  too  earn- 
est in  the  pursuit  of  righteousness  ?  "  I  have 
asked  myself  constantly  while  studying  your 
letter,  "  Would  Jesus  have  said  '  Seek  the 
Kingdom  of  God  and  His  Righteousness  — 
but  seek  it  not  too  earnestly  or  with  fervor  '  ?  " 
If  the  Socialist  ideal  is  as  true  and  noble  as 
you  declare  it  to  be,  surely  it  cannot  be  too 
fervently  pursued.  It  may,  of  course,  be  un- 
wisely pursued  —  as,  for  example,  when  men 
seek  the  short-cut  of  compromise  with  Error 
^Page  38. 


CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER  21 

in  the  vain  effort  to  promote  the  cause  of 
Truth  —  but  too  much  moral  earnestness 
there  cannot  be.  If  the  ideal  cannot  be  im- 
mediately attained,  the  most  strenuous  efforts 
toward  it  will  not  achieve  the  impossible. 
They  can  only  bring  the  possibility  of  attain- 
ment nearer.  On  the  other  hand,  if  it  can 
be  attained  immediately  the  only  danger  is  in 
delay.  The  pessimistic  unfaith  to  Truth,  the 
infidelity  which  declares  that  it  is  not  expedi- 
ent to  do  right,  is  a  curse  to  the  world  and  a 
blasphemy. 

Socialism  I  ^^'^^  '^  your  letter  so  many  mis- 
•"*'*'"'''"'"°**^  representations  of  Socialism  and 
its  advocates  as  were  ever  compressed  in  such 
small  compass.  Your  picture  of  the  "  fac- 
tory-hand"  (Your  adoption  of  the  popular, 
impersonal  term  shows  how  completely  the 
fact  that  the  worker  is  anything  but  the  ad- 
junct of  a  machine  is  forgotten!),  taking  his 
.Sunday  stroll  to  the  suburbs  and  looking  with 
envy  upon  the  mansion  of  wealth  "  which 
Karl  Marx,  or  a  disciple  of  Karl  Marx,  has 
told  him  ought  to  be  his  own,"  ^  is  a  case  in 
point.  No  word  of  Marx  can  be  found  in  all 
'  Page  3. 


22  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

his    voluminous    writings    which    gives    the 
sHghtest  warrant  for  such  a  statement ;  neither 
Marx  nor  anyone  who  can  be  called  a  disciple 
of  Marx  ever   held  or  believed   anything   so 
foolish.     The  poor,   ill-paid   and  overworked 
toiler  may  go  from  the  dreary  hovel  which 
only     Love    makes    worthy     the    name     of 
"  home  "  to  see  the  mansion  of  wealth.     If 
he  is  ignorant  of  the  great  principles  of  po- 
litical economy  which  Marx  taught,  he  may 
be  filled  with  envy  and  hatred  of  the  owner  of 
the  mansion.     If,  however,  he  has  even  the 
faintest  perception  of  what  Marx  taught,  he 
is   not   envious;    he   does   not,    can    not,    say 
"  That  fine  mansion  ought  to  be  mine."     He 
knows  that  the  costly  mansion  with  its  elab- 
orate furnishings  (a  large  part  of  which  may 
be  quite  useless,   or  worse)    were   purchased 
with  the  proceeds  of  the  joint  labor  of  hun- 
dreds of  workers  like  himself.     He  contrasts 
the  waste  and  luxury  of  the  mansion  with  his 
own  poverty  and  declares  the  distribution  of 
wealth  to  be  unjust.     He  does  not  feel  envy 
or  hatred  toward  the  owner  of  the  mansion 
(except  for  personal  reasons,   perhaps,   quite 
distinct  from  the  possession  of  the  wealth)  be 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  23 

cause  he  knows  that  it  is  the  system  which  is 
at  fault  and  that  the  rich  man  is  no  more  re- 
sponsible for  making  that  system  than  him- 
self. 
Grotesqa©        Again,   whcu   you  suggest,   infer- 

ideas  of  .    , ,  ,  ^^        .    , . 

Socialism  cntially,  that  bocialists  are  trying 
to  leap  into  the  millenium,^  and  when  you  say 
that  all  the  instruments  of  production  are  to 
be  simultaneously  transferred  to  the  Socialist 
State,^  you  gravely,  but,  no  doubt,  without  in- 
tention, wrong  the  Socialist.  The  latter 
statement  is  so  demonstrably  and  obviously 
impossible  that  it  is  inconceivable  that  any 
sane  man  could  believe  it  for  a  moment  to  be 
practicable.  I  am  quite  certain  that  you 
would  not  deny  that  among  the  many  millions 
of  Socialists  scattered  throughout  the  world 
there  are  some  who  are  sane  and  intelligent 
enough  to  reject  such  an  absurd  proposal  as 
impossible.  Just  as  I  have  met  many  thou- 
sands of  Socialists  in  various  lands  without 
ever  meeting  one  remotely  resembling  your 
factory-worker  contemplating  the  mansion 
with  envy,  I  have  never  met  one  who  believed 
in  the  simultaneous  transformation  of  society. 

^Page  38.  2  Page  32. 


24  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

It  would  be  fundamentally  opposed  to  the 
whole  philosophy  of  Socialism. 
The  critics  of  ^  ^ave  oftcu  marvelled  that  so 
Socialism  many  writers  and  lecturers  under- 
take to  oppose  Socialism  without  taking  the 
trouble  to  understand  it.  In  the  case  of  other 
subjects  this  is  rarely  so.  No  one  presumes 
to  lecture  upon  or  write  about  theology,  for 
instance,  without  some  information  upon  the 
subject.  The  same  is  true  of  geology,  chem- 
istry, biology,  history,  and  most  other  sub- 
jects. When  we  come  to  Socialism,  however, 
critics  abound  who  have  never  made  an  at- 
tempt to  understand  its  meaning.  Even  the 
most  superficial  examination  of  Socialism 
would  suffice  to  acquit  its  advocates  from  the 
charge  of  seeking  to  change  the  whole  social 
and  political  life  of  the  nation,  or  of  the  world, 
at  a  single  stroke.  On  the  contrary,  they 
alone  of  all  who  seek  to  remedy  the  ills  of  to- 
day base  all  their  efforts  and  their  programmes 
upon  a  sense  of  the  continuity  of  human  his- 
tory, upon  the  fact  that  Past,  Present  and  Fu- 
ture are  linked  together  by  the  phenomena  of 
evolution.  The  Socialist  movement  of  to-day, 
quite  unlike  the  Utopian  schemes  and  visions 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  25 

innumerable  which  were  identified  with  the 
word  "  SociaHsm,"  and  whose  only  connec- 
tion with  the  Socialism  of  to-day  is  that  they 
mark  the  line  of  departure  from  visionary 
schemes  to  the  study  of  facts,  does  not  seek 
to  interfere  with  natural  laws.  On  the  con- 
trary, it  seeks  to  make  clear  the  laws  which 
govern  the  progress  of  human  society,  in  or- 
der that  human  effort  shall  make  for  an  intel- 
ligent cooperation  with  those  laws.  And 
this,  which  is  the  very  soul  of  Socialism,  is 
in  the  interests  of  that  peaceful  progress  which 
you  and  all  good  men  desire,  and  against  that 
havoc  and  violence  which  you  and  all  good 
men  fear. 

Social  evo-  The  Socialist  sees  in  the  long  his- 
lution  |.Qj.y    q£    mankind     an    evolution 

from  Savagedom  through  Slavedom  and  Serf- 
dom to  a  very  complex  industrial  civilization. 
From  the  disappearance  of  rude  savagery  and 
the  appearance  of  slavery,  the  story  is  one  of 
great  struggles  —  owners  and  slaves,  lords 
and  serfs,  masters  and  workmen  constantly 
struggling  for  supremacy.  The  great  slave- 
lords  of  antiquity  were  superseded  by  the  serf- 
lords   of   medieval    feudalism,   and    these,    in 


26  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

turn,  by  the  industrial,  manufacturing  class. 
Without  denying  the  part  which  ideals,  be- 
liefs and  emotions  have  played  in  the  great 
drama  of  human  progress,  the  Socialist  points 
out  that  every  epochal  change  has  depended 
upon,  and  been  made  possible  by,  some  change 
in  the  economic  system.  New  means  of  pro- 
ducing and  exchanging  wealth  have  invariably 
preceded  the  great  historical  changes  which 
divide  the  world's  history  into  epochs. 
B6ieofthe  ^^^  industrial  revolution  in  Eng- 
fionl^Eng-  land,  so  well  described  by  Arnold 
h  history  Toynbee,  resulted  from  the  series 
of  great  inventions  by  which  new  modes  of 
wealth-production  were  made  possible.  The 
subsequent  growth  of  England,  its  social  and 
political  developments,  cannot  be  understood 
if  the  work  of  the  great  inventors,  Har- 
greaves,  Arkwright,  Crompton,  Cartwright, 
and  others,  is  not  taken  into  account.  A 
study  of  the  expansion  of  the  franchised  class 
and  the  presence  of  the  present  strong  Labor 
Party  in  the  House  of  Commons,  leads  in- 
evitably back  to  the  great  mventions  and  the 
industrial  changes  they  occasioned  Tn  like 
manner,  the  student  of  social  legislation,  tne 


CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER  2/ 

factory  laws  and  other  legislation  of  a  similar 
kind,  finds  himself  led  back  to  the  same  events. 
It  does  not  rob  history  of  its  idealism  and 
romance  to  admit  this  great  truth,  as  most 
modern  historians  do.  It  does  not,  for  in- 
stance, deny  the  inspiration  of  great  humani- 
tarians like  Robert  Owen,  Richard  Oastler, 
Lord  Shaftsbury,  Bronterre  O'Brien,  and 
other  notable  pioneers  of  social  and  political 
reform,  to  admit  that  the  advances  they  strug- 
gled for  with  splendid  courage  and  faith  were 
made  possible  only  by  the  enlarged  indus- 
trial powers  of  man. 

^frcesTn"  If  we  tum  from  England  to  the 
American  his-  "(jnitej  Statcs,  and  study  impar- 
tially the  history  of  its  system  of  slavery,  and 
its  abolition  as  an  incident  of  the  Civil  War, 
we  shall  find  the  same  truth  graphically  ex- 
pressed. Few  great  epochal  events  in  the  re- 
cent history  of  mankind  have  been  so  univer- 
sally ascribed  to  the  triumph  of  idealism  as 
the  abolition  of  slavery  in  the  Southern 
States.  Now,  it  is  not  necessary  to  deny,  or 
even  to  minimize,  the  idealistic  factor,  the 
work  and  sacrifice  of  Garrison.  Phillips,  John 
Brown,  Lincoln,  and  others  of  the  noble  host, 


28  CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER 

as  a  result  of  the  belief  that  economic  forces 
made  possible  the  glorious  event  of  Emanci- 
pation. 

Economics  of  Was  it  not  au  economic  necessity, 
slavery  ^-^^  ^^^^^  £qj.  ^  ^.j^gg  q£  cheap  men- 

ial laborers,  which  led  to  the  enslavement  of 
the  free  barbarians  of  Africa  and  their  forced 
deportation  to  America,  just  as  at  an  earlier 
date  English  felons  had  been  enslaved,  and 
"  press  gangs  "  had  scoured  English  villages 
and  forcibly  deported  many  British  freemen 
to  meet  the  same  desperate  need?  On  the 
other  hand,  was  it  not  a  contrary  condition, 
the  presence  of  an  abundant  supply  of  such 
labor,  which  made  the  institution  of  African 
slave-labor  an  impossibility  in  Europe  ?  ^ 
Does  anybody  now  believe  that  the  very  gen- 
eral manumission  of  slaves  by  the  people  in 
the  North,  while  the  people  in  the  South  clung 
tenaciously  to  their  human  chattels,  resulted 
from  any  moral  superiority  of  the  Northern 
slaveowners  over  those  of  the  Southern 
States?  Has  it  not  been  abundantly  shown 
that    slave-labor    had    become    relatively    un- 

1  c.  f.  Slavery  and  Abolition,  by  A.   Bushnell  Hart, 
LL.D.  (1906). 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  29 

profitable,  and  that  the  manumission  of  slaves 
in  the  North  was  due  to  that  fact,  just  as  the 
liberation  of  many  thousands  of  Roman  slaves 
was  the  result  of  an  increasing  relative  un- 
profitableness? The  North  had,  owing  to  a 
variety  of  causes,  come  earlier  than  the  South 
to  the  universal  conclusion  that,  in  the  words 
of  Adam  Smith,  "  the  work  done  by  slaves, 
though  it  appears  to  cost  only  their  mainte- 
nance, is,  in  the  end,  the  dearest  of  any."  ^ 

In  this  connection,  the  influence 
in  «fe  North      of    thc    great    British    economist 

and  the  South  ... 

may  be  clearly  seen  m  the  famous 
utterance  made  by  Mr.  Ellsworth  in  the  Con- 
stitutional Convention.  "  Let  us  not  inter- 
meddle," he  said,  "  as  population  increases 
poor  laborers  will  be  so  plenty  as  to  render 
slaves  useless."  ^  In  the  North  the  increase 
in  population  and  the  development  of  the 
manufacturing  system,  at  a  very  early  period 
in  the  history  of  the  new  republic,  rendered 
chattel  slavery  so  unprofitable  that  negro  chil- 
dren were  given  away  as  soon  as  they  were 

1  Wealth  of  NationSj  Book  III,  Chapter  2. 

2  Hart,   American  History   Told   by   Contemporaries, 
III,  p.  218. 


30  CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER 

weaned,  like  puppies,  and  advertised  in  the 
newspapers  to  be  given  away.^  In  the  South, 
on  the  other  hand,  the  relative  scarcity  of  la- 
borers, and  the  increased  demand  for  labor 
which  arose  as  a  result  of  the  adoption  of 
Whitney's  cotton-gin,  made  chattel  slavery  a 
matter  of  vital  economic  importance  and  its 
i  profitable  continuance  for  a  long  time  possi- 
ble. It  can  scarcely  be  doubted  at  this  time 
that  had  the  South  been  left  to  its  own  re- 
sources and  experience  in  the  matter  slavery 
would  soon  have  died  a  natural  death.  As  it 
was,  many  Southern  slave-owners  had  come 
to  the  conclusion  that  slavery  was  unprofit- 
able long  before  the  Civil  War  began.  Before 
the  war  was  finished  the  question  of  slavery 
had  become  relatively  unimportant,  so  much 
so,  indeed,  that  the  confederate  cabinet  itself 
proposed  to  abolish  slavery  in  order  to  win 
European  friendship.^ 

1  Williams,  History  of  the  NegHbl  Race  in  America, 
p.  209.  The  reader  is  also  referred*'  to  the  interesting 
little  monograph,  Class  Struggles  in  America,  by  A.  M. 
Simons,  Third  Edition,  1907,  for  a  suggestive  discus- 
sion of  this  important  phase  of  American  history. 

2  Rhodes,  History  of  the  U.  S.,  v.  66-67. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  3 1 

Pains. due  to  I^  some  parts  of  this  long  argi,i- 
transition  nieiit  appear  to  you  somewhat  ir- 
relevant, I  beg  you  be  patient.  Socialism 
formulates  the  law  of  social  evolution  in  defi- 
nite, scientific  terms.  Its  basal  argument  is 
that  the  prime  factor  in  the  determination  of 
the  course  of  human  history  is  the  extent  of 
man's  power  over  the  hostile  forces  of  na- 
ture; that  great  changes  in  the  economic  in- 
stitutions and  agencies  of  production  and 
distribution,  necessitate  a  readjustment  of  the 
social  and  political  institutions  to  correspond. 
The  period  of  transition  and  readjustment  is 
naturally  one  of  sufifering  and  discomfort  by 
reason  of  the  lack  of  balance  between  the  eco- 
nomic soul  of  society  and  its  social  and  po- 
litical environment.  When  you  speak  of 
human  society  being  in  its  general  structure 
"  an  ordinance  of  nature,"  ^  I  presume  that 
some  recognition  of  a  great  law,  or  great 
laws,  of  evolution  is  implied.  Otherwise  I 
confess  the  passage  has  for  me  no  meaning. 
In  the  former  edition  of  your  letter,  published 
under  the  title,  Progress  or  Revolution  f  there 
was  a  passage  ^  to  the  effect  that  "  changes 
1  Page  37.       -  Page  24, 


32  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

happy  in  their  permanent  effects  often  bring 
temporary  evil  in  their  train."  You  in- 
stanced as  illustrations  of  this  the  introduc- 
tion of  machinery  and  the  development  of  the 
great  department  stores. 
Concentration    I  regret  the  omission  of  the  pas- 

Essential  to  ,     ^  ,  , . 

progress  sagc  quotcd  irom  the  present  edi- 

tion of  your  letter.  It  states  a  contention  of 
the  Socialist  with  admirable  force  and  clarity. 
Many  of  the  evils  of  our  present  social  sys- 
tem undoubtedly  so  caused.  The  evils  attend- 
ant upon  the  monopolization  of  industry  and 
commerce,  for  example,  are  very  great,  but  no 
Socialist  doubts  that  the  concentration  is,  upon 
the  whole,  in  the  direction  of  good.  The  So- 
cialist may  base  his  indictment  of  capitalism 
largely  upon  the  evils  associated  with  the  de- 
velopment of  great  monopolies,  but  he  knows 
the  monopolies  to  be  inevitable  and  essential  to 
human  progress.  Many  of  our  most  appalling 
evils  appear  to  be  the  birth  pangs  consequent 
upon  the  birth  of  a  new  Social  order,  the  entry 
of  Man  upon  a  new  stage  of  his  great  upward 
and  Godward  climb. 

Prophecies  fui-  I"  0"^  own  time,  even  the  genera- 
^"®**  lion  still  in  its  prime,  we  have  seen 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  33 

great  changes  take  place  in  the  economic  Hfe 
of  society.  We  have  seen  the  competition 
which  our  fathers  regarded  as  "  the  Hfe  of 
trade  "  gradually  die,  leaving  monopoly  and 
combination  in  its  place.  Half  a  century 
ago,  Karl  Marx  predicted  this.^  He  pointed 
out  that  competition  would  not  be  destroyed 
from  without,  by  conscious  effort  on  the  part 
of  those  who  believed  it  to  be  an  evil,  but 
that  it  was  destined  to  destroy  itself.  He 
predicted  the  coming  of  the  great  Trusts  and 
corporations,  but  his  predictions  fell  upon 
skeptical  ears.  Little  more  than  a  quarter  of 
a  century  ago,  a  dear  friend  of  mine,  Mr, 
Henry  M.  Hyndman,  an  English  economist 
of  note,  while  visiting  the  United  States  wrote 
to  Mr.  John  Morley  expressing  in  confident 
terms  that  an  age  of  industrial  concentration 
was  near,  an  age  in  which  "  great  trusts  and 
combines  controlling  practically  .all  the  great 
industries  of  the  country  "  would  be  formed. 
Mr.  Morley  published  that  letter  in  the  Pall 
Mall  Gazette  and  it  later  found  its  way  into 
the  columns  oi  the  New  York  Tribune,  the 
editor  of  which  ridiculed  the  idea.  The 
^Capital,  English  edition,  p.  789;  Kerr  edition,  p.  836. 


34  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

American  editor  could  not  imagine  such  a 
state  of  things :  it  was  "  foreign  to  the  Amer- 
ican idea."  Mr.  Hyndman  was  described  as 
the  greatest  "  fool  traveller "  who  had  ever 
visited  the  United  States.  Yet,  it  was  but  a 
twelvemonth  or  thereabouts  before  the  Stand- 
ard Oil  Company  was  formed.  Since  that 
time  the  progress  of  industrial  and  commer- 
cial concentration  has  been  rapid  and  cer- 
tain. To-day  we  are  confronted  everywhere 
by  the  great  so-called  Trust  Problem. 
Attempts  to      You  rightly  say  that  "  Society  is 

revert  to  com-  ,    .  .  , 

petition  fcvoltmg  agamst  trusts  and  com- 

bines";^ rebelling  against  the  subjection  of 
its  life  to  the  rule  of  a  minority  of  industrial 
lords.  But  what  solution  is  proposed  other 
than  Socialism  to  this  grave  problem  of  mo- 
nopoly? Is  there  a  single  proposed  solution 
other  than  Socialism  which  commands  serious 
attention?  True,  there  are  those  who,  not 
recognizing  the  laws  of  industrial  evolution, 
want  to  destroy  the  monopolies  and  return  to 
competitive  methods.  They  believe  that  the 
trusts  and  combines  are  the  product  of  wick- 
edness and  greed;  not  recognizing  the  impos- 
^Page  15. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  35 

sibility  of  reversing  natural  laws,  they  vainly 
desire  to  return  to  competition.  They  look 
to  the  power  of  the  State  to  lead  them  back- 
ward to  the  Golden  Age  of  competition,  and 
when  the  State  makes  the  attempt  with  anti- 
trust laws  the  result  is  pathetic  in  the  ex- 
treme. 

The  Socialists,  on  the  other  hand, 

The  commun-  '  ' 

d^uoiTof"  see  the  course  of  natural  evolu- 
to-day  tion,  inexorable  and  certain  as  the 

flight  of  time.  They  do  not  talk  about  the 
"  wickedness  "  of  the  combinations,  but  point 
to  their  inevitability  and  urge  that  the  neces- 
sary readjustment  of  the  social  and  political 
system  be  made  to  remedy  the  awful  ills  re- 
sulting from  the  lack  of  adjustment  —  the 
veritable  anarchy  which  exists  between  our 
methods  of  wealth  production  and  its  distri- 
bution and  enjoyment.  Individual  produc- 
tion, as  the  prevailing  system,  has  passed  away 
forever,  so  far  as  it  is  possible  now  to  see. 
You  rightly  point  out  that  there  is  a  vast 
amount  of  cooperation  or  communism  in  the 
production  of  wealth  to-day.^  If  we  take 
such  a  common  article  as  a  penny  newspaper 
1  Page  22. 


36  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

and  attempt  to  trace  all  the  activities  which 
have  entered  into  its  production,  the  makers 
of  the  paper,  the  fellers  of  the  great  forest 
trees,  the  makers  of  the  tools  used  by  these, 
the  iron  and  coal  miners,  the  makers  and 
operators  of  the  machines,  the  railway  work- 
ers and  many  others  whose  labors  must  be 
expended  before  there  is  so  much  as  a  sheet 
of  plain  paper  to  be  printed  on;  if  we  add  to 
these  the  thousands  of  other  workers  whose 
labor,  directly  or  indirectly,  is  combined  in 
the  paper  we  so  lightly  toss  aside,  a  wonder- 
ful vision  of  automatic  and  half  unconscious 
cooperation,  wonderfully  beautiful,  appears. 
Now,  Socialism  is,  in  its  last  and  deepest 
analysis,  an  effort  to  communalize  the  full 
benefits  of  this  communism  of  production. 
The  issue  to-day  is  whether  the  trusts  shall 
own  and  control  the  nation,  or  whether  the 
people  shall  own  and  control  the  nation  and 
all  its  resources.  The  trust  socializes  pro- 
duction to  a  very  great  degree  and  individual- 
izes the  product;  Socialism  would  socialize  the 
product  as  well  as  the  labor  of  production. 
Until  that  end  is  attained  society  must  writhe 
in  the  cruel,  bitter,  needless  struggle  of  hos- 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  37 

tile  interests  which  your  letter  depicts  with 
so  much  concern.  That  is  the  revolution  the 
Socialists  seek  to  bring  about,  not  by  violence 
and  bloodshed,  but  by  the  triumph  of  reason 
and  conscience  over  ignorance  and  greed. 
The  social  revolution  which  we  work  for  is  a 
peaceful  revolution,  by  political  conquest,  in 
the  interests  of  Progress  and  Peace. 
confnsionof  ^  trust  you  will  pardou  the  implied 
**™''  criticism  if  I  say  that  I  find  it  dif- 

ficult to  assure  myself  of  your  exact  meaning 
at  times,  owing  to  the  fact  that  you  do  not 
always  use  words  in  the  same  sense.  With 
no  desire  to  be  hypercritical,  I  call  your  at- 
tention to  the  fact  that  while  on  page  six  you 
make  a  distinction  between  capital  and  capi- 
talists, you  do  not  in  subsequent  pages  bear 
the  distinction  in  mind.  On  the  page  noted 
you  say  that  "  It  is  not  between  capital  and 
labor  generally  that  the  present  war  has 
broken  out,  but  between  the  capitaHst  em- 
ploying a  body  of  workmen,  and  those  whose 
wages  he  is  supposed  to  determine."  If  I  un- 
derstand the  import  of  this  passage  and  its 
immediate  context  correctly,  you  would  em- 
phasize  that   "  capital  "    is   inert,    impersonal, 

450128 


38  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

while  the  "  war "  is  a  human  struggle  into 
which  all  human  weaknesses  and  passions 
must  enter.  When  you  use  the  word  "  capi- 
tal "  in  the  paragraphs  immediately  follow- 
ing the  passage  quoted,  you  give  it  the  same 
meaning,  but  when  you  use  it  later,  on  page 
ten,  the  sense  is  entirely  different.  You  say: 
"  That  capital  ^  can  be  rapacious  and  unjust 
to  those  in  its  employ  is  too  certain.  It  can 
be  worse  than  rapacious  and  unjust,  it  can 
be  terribly  cruel.  Proof  of  this  may  be  read 
in  the  reports  recording  the  treatment  of  chil- 
dren in  factories  and  of  men,  women  and 
children  in  coal  mines  which  horrified  the 
British  people  and  compelled  the  interference 
of  the  British  Parliament."  In  this  para- 
graph "  capital "  ceases  to  be  an  inert,  im- 
personal thing  and  becomes  a  conscious  social 
force.  That  I  am  not  in  error  in  so  under- 
standing it  is  shown,  I  think,  very  clearly  by 
the  passage  immediately  following  "  Men  ^ 
who  were  guilty  of  such  things  may  have  been 
humane  and  even  amiable  in  other  walks  of 
life.  The  lust  of  gain  hardened  their  hearts. 
One  of  the  great  mine-owners  was  a  wealthy 

1  Italics  mine. —  J.  S. 


CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER  39 

peer  who  deserved  to  be  sent  to  work  in  his 
own  mines."  It  is  quite  clear  from  this  that 
you  fail  to  observe  the  important  distinction 
which  you  recognized  and  emphasized.  This 
loose  use  of  terms  is  frequently  met  with  in 
your  letter  and  is  a  cause  of  some  obscurity 
and  much  confusion. 

The  "War  of  Throughout  you  speak  with  dep- 
the  Classes  recatiou  and  impatience  of  those 
who  give  the  relations  of  the  employed  and 
employing  classes  "  the  aspect  of  a  war  be- 
tween classes."  Yet,  if  words  are  to  be  given 
their  ordinary  meaning,  you  frequently  give 
the  relations  of  the  employer  and  his  em- 
ployees "  the  aspect  of  a  war  between 
classes."  Thus :  On  page  three  you  speak 
of  "  The  sharp  separation,  industrial  and  so- 
cial, between  employer  and  employed  "  as  be- 
ing "  another  evil  attendant  upon  the  intro- 
duction of  production  on  a  large  scale." 
Does  this  convey  the  idea  of  class  distinction? 
Again,  on  page  eleven  you  say,  "  The  masters 
are  naturally  combined  in  the  effort  to  keep 
down  wages."  I  ask  why  they  should  "  nat- 
urally "  so  combine  if  there  is  no  class  divi- 
sion in  society !     When,  on  page  six,  in  the 


40  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

passage  already  quoted,  you  speak  of  a  "  pres- 
ent war  "  between  the  capitalist  and  his  work- 
men, are  not  definite  class  distinctions  as 
clearly  indicated  as  language  permits? 

Allied  with  your  deprecation  of  statements 
that  there  is  a  deep-rooted  class  antagonism, 
is  your  implied  accusation  that  Socialists  in- 
cite class  hatred.  While  this  is  a  very  com- 
mon accusation,  it  is,  so  far  as  my  experience 
goes,  altogether  unfounded  and  untrue.  All 
Socialists,  with  the  possible  exception  of  a  few 
overzealous  and  uninformed  individuals,  will 
agree  with  your  statement  that  no  good  pur- 
pose can  be  served  by  venemous  exaggeration, 
"  applying  to  a  whole  class  epithets  of  abuse 
which  only  the  worst  members  of  it  can  de- 
serve." ^  Unless  I  have  utterly  and  lament- 
ably failed  in  my  attempt  to  make  clear  the 

1  Page  28.  The  careful  reader  will  note  that  Pro- 
fessor Smith,  with  characteristic  inconsistency,  uses  the 
term  '  class '  which  he  so  earnestly  condemns  the  So- 
cialist for  using.  Incidentally,  the  quotation  warrants 
the  suggestion,  made  in  the  same  sentence,  that  the 
whole  body  of  Socialists  ought  not  tO'  be  held  responsi- 
ble for  the  utterances  of  its  least  educated  and  most 
ignorant  members.  What  is  sauce  for  the  capitalist 
goose  must  be  sauce  for  the  Socialist  gander! 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  4I 

fundamental  doctrine  of   Socialism,  you  will 
readily  perceive  that  it  precludes   abuse   and 
hatred  of  the  capitalist  as  an  individual. 
Socialism  and    The  Capitalist  epoch  which  we  be- 

pea«e£al  prog-      .  ... 

rees  licvc  to  bc  uow  Tipcnmg  luto  an 

epoch  of  Socialism  could  not  have  been  es- 
caped by  society,  omitted  from  its  evolution, 
by  any  exercise  of  prudent  genius  or  the  ob- 
servance of  any  ethical  code.  Capitalism, 
therefore,  represents  a  necessary  stage  in  the 
world-progress,  and  the  capitalist  class,  as 
such,  has  performed  a  distinct  and  important 
service  to  mankind.  It  is  only  since  the  de- 
velopment of  industry  to  a  point  where  vast 
organization  and  mechanical  power  have  made 
possible  the  existence  of  enormous  productive 
and  distributive  units  that  the  capitalist,  as 
such,  has  become  superfluous.  In  accordance 
with  a  law  of  evolution  familiar  to  the  biolo- 
gist, and  equally  important  to  the  sociologist, 
that  which  once  served  a  useful  purpose  be- 
comes unnecessary  and  loses  its  function,  or 
continues  to  exercise  it  only  as  a  parasite  and 
a  menace  to  the  life  it  once  served.  I  re- 
peat, the  Socialists  do  not  foment  hatred  be- 
tween the  men  on  the  one  side  who  are  de- 


42  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

voted  to  their  natural  interests  as  capitalists 
and  the  men  on  the  other  side  who  are  de- 
voted to  their  interests  as  wage-workers. 
Elsewhere/  I  have  made  the  claim  for  Social- 
ism that,  by  developing  the  class-conscious- 
ness of  the  workers,  by  pointing  out  the  social 
significance  of  the  antagonism  between  classes 
which  almost  every  man  vaguely  feels,  where 
he  does  not  clearly  comprehend,  it  is  making 
for  peaceful  progress  against  red-handed  anar- 
chy and  violence.  I  repeat  that  claim  here 
with  increased  confidence. 

It  is  not  wonderful  that  the  aw- 
"^il^'*ed  ful    inequalities   of   wealth   and 

discontent "  .  i   •    i 

enjoyment  which  mark  our  so- 
cial system  should  produce  feelings  of  envy 
on  the  part  of  the  less  favored.  The  worker 
who  toils  for  a  pittance  in  a  factory  where 
foul  atmosphere  menaces  the  health,  lives 
in  a  tenement  where  decent  opportunities 
are  denied  to  his  family,  works  at  joyless, 
soul-deadening  tasks,  sees  no  hope  for  the 
future  nor  any  reward  for  his  life's  work 
but  an  old  age  made   miserable  by  poverty, 

1  Socialism,  A  Summary  and  Interpretation  of  Social- 
ist Principles,  p.  144. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  43 

can  hardly  be  blamed  if  he  views  with  rage 
and  resentment  the  wealth  and  luxury  en- 
joyed by  others,  especially  wdien  he  feels 
that  the  labor  of  himself  and  others  makes 
the  wealth  and  luxury  so  wantonly  displayed 
in  contrast  to  his  own  poverty.  Hatred  and 
envy  are  the  natural  fruitage  of  the  social 
system  in  which  the  poorest  are  they  who  pro- 
duce most  wealth,  and  the  richest  are  they 
who  neither  toil  nor  spin.  Instinctively,  un- 
restrained by  education,  the  class  feeling  of 
the  workers  leads  to  bitterness  against  the 
individuals  of  the  other  class,  and,  often  to 
deeds  of  violence.  The  Socialist  philosophy, 
by  placing  this  class  antagonism  in  its  true 
light  as  one  of  the  great  social  dynamic  forces, 
not  only  prevents  personal  hatreds  and  the 
otherwise  inevitable  resort  to  violence,  but 
provides  a  more  effective  and  intelligent  out- 
let for  the  energies  of  the  dissatisfied.  It  im- 
poses upon  the  working  class  a  sense  of  the 
impersonality  of  its  struggle  with  the  master 
class,  and  the  role  it  must  play  in  the  recon- 
struction of  society.  By  its  political  organi- 
zation, on  a  definite  basis  of  class  interests, 
the   working   class   must,    by   peaceful,   legal 


44  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

means,  transform  the  social  and  political  in- 
stitutions of  society  to  a  point  of  ■  agreement 
with  the  socialized  production  of  wealth  al- 
ready developed  by  capitalism. 

Socialism,  then,  is  not  inspired  by  class 
hatred.  It  is,  on  the  contrary,  the  most 
powerful,  and  almost  the  only,  force  in  the 
world  making  for  peaceful  change  and  in- 
dustrial order.  It  does  not  aim  to  change 
masters,  setting  up  the  exploited  of  to-day  to 
become  the  bread-masters  and  exploiters.  It 
means  the  destruction  of  the  fundamental  con- 
ditions which  make  the  exploitation  of  one 
class  by  another  possible;  it  means  the  estab- 
lishment of  such  conditions  as  will  make  fra- 
ternal peace  possible.  Socialism  is  in  a  very 
real  sense  the  Herald  of 

"  Peace  on  earth  and  Goodwill  among  men." 
The  meaning  When  wc  spcak  of  the  Socialist 
of  "labor"  movement  as  a  movement  of  the 
working-class,  and  make  our  appeal  primarily 
to  that  class,  we  do  not  mean  that  none  but 
workingmen  and  workingwomen  may  be  So- 
cialists or  join  our  ranks.  Nor  do  we  mean 
manual  labor  alone  when  we  speak  of  labor 
applied  to  appropriate  natural  objects  as  the 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  45 

sole  source  of  wealth,  as  you  suppose.^  I 
confess  that  I  read  your  argument  based  upon 
that  assumption  with  amazement  indescrib- 
able. Had  an  uneducated  man,  one  who  was 
unfamiliar  with  the  most  elementary  princi- 
ples of  political  economy,  made  such  a  mistake 
it  would  have  been  understandable.  You, 
however,  do  not  occupy  that  position.  It  is 
simply  inconceivable  that  you  should  be  ig- 
norant of  the  fact  that  all  the  great  political 
economists,  writers  like  Adam  Smith,  Ricardo, 
John  Stuart  Mill,  and  others  more  recent,  use 
the  term  "  labor  "  to  connote  all  useful,  pro- 
ductive energies  regardless  of  whether  they 
be  mental  or  physical.  In  the  case  of  a  rail- 
way, for  example,  the  Socialist,  following  the 
time-honored  usage  of  the  economists  of  all 
schools  and  times,  includes  in  the  category  of 
its  necessary  labor  the  designs  planned  by  its 
engineers  and  architects,  the  mental  energies 
expended  in  the  making  of  its  time-schedules, 
its  management,  and  so  on,  equally  with  the 
physical  energies  of  the  plate-layers,  engine- 
drivers,  signalmen  and  conductors.  But 
when  all  these  services  have  been  paid  for, 
^  Pages  5-6. 


46  CAPITALIST    AND   LABORER 

when  even  the  "  services "  of  the  "  dummy 
directors  "  and  "  guinea  pigs  "  have  been  ex- 
travagantly paid  for,  there  is  a  surpkis  which 
is  distributed  in  the  form  of  interest  among 
people  who,  beyond  the  investment  of  money, 
have  performed  no  service  of  any  kind  for  the 
railroad  —  who,  in  many  cases,  have  never 
seen  the  railroads  from  which  their  dividends 
are  drawn.  Their  reward  comes  simply  as 
interest  upon  invested  capital,  and  this,  for  the 
most  part,  is  simply  so  much  fruit  of  the  ex- 
ploitation of  past  labor,  just  as  the  interest 
it  now  draws  is  the  fruit  of  present  exploita- 
tion. So  we  appeal  to  the  workers,  making 
no  distinction  between  the  different  forms  of 
labor,  who  feel  the  burden  of  this  exploita- 
tion and  its  injustice  to  join  in  a  great  com- 
mon movement  for  its  abolition.  Some  of  the 
brain-workers,  those  who  are  paid  extrava- 
gant salaries,  will  not  be  driven  by  economic 
motives  to  join  in  with  the  manual  workers, 
their  interests  being  nearly  allied  to  those  of 
the  capitalists.  Again,  some  of  the  capitalists 
themselves,  feeling  the  justice  of  the  workers' 
claims,  will  join  us,  but  their  number  must 
needs  be  relatively  few.     It  is  in  this  sense. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  47 

and  in  this  sense  only,  that  the  Socialist  move- 
ment is  a  class  movement. 
Thecapitaust    Not  Only  do  you  continually  mis- 
not  a  producer  ^^^^^  ^j^^  position  of  the  Socialist 

when  you  represent  him  as  contending  that 
all  progress  and  wealth  are  "  entirely  the 
work  of  the  manual  laborer  and  that  the  man- 
ual laborer  is  entitled  to  the  whole,"  but  you 
constantly  confuse  the  position  of  the  capital- 
ist with  that  of  the  director  of  industry. 
"  The  capitalist,"  you  say,  "  besides  the 
money  which  he  risks,  contributes  labor  of  an 
indispensable  kind  as  organizer  and  director, 
and  is  entitled  to  payment  for  that  labor  as 
well  as  to  interest  on  his  capital."  ^  Of 
course,  there  are  many  capitalists  who,  as 
managers  and  directors,  but  not  as  capitalists, 
do  contribute  such  services  as  you  describe, 
and,  of  course,  they  should  be  remunerated 
for  those  services.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  they 
are  so  remunerated.  Thus  far  they  are  pro- 
ducers, not  capitalists.  After  a  man  has  been 
paid  fully  for  any  such  service  rendered  as 
a  manager,  if  he  draws  a  further  sum  for 
which  he  has  not  rendered  an  equivalent  serv- 
1  Page  6. 


48  CAPITALIST.  AND    LABORER 

ice  in  return,  he  is  to  that  extent  an  exploiter 
of  labor.  Take  the  director  of  a  company 
who  is  paid  a  salary  of  one  hundred  thousand 
dollars  a  year:  Waiving  the  question  of  the 
righteousness  of  such  a  big  salary,  is  it  not 
obvious  that  if  he  invests  half  of  that  sum  in 
some  enterprise  in  which  he  does  not  serve  as 
a  director,  possibly  in  a  remote  part  of  the 
world  which  he  has  never  seen,  and  draws 
interest  upon  it,  there  can  be  no  sort  of  justi- 
fication for  saying  that  he  has  "  contributed 
labor  of  an  indispensable  kind  "  to  the  busi- 
ness in  which  his  money  is  invested  ?  No,  the 
capitalist,  as  capitalist,  performs  no  useful 
service. 

Wages  and  There  is  another  paragraph  in 
^'^^^^  your  letter  so  remarkable  for  its 

misconception  of  the  economics  of  Socialism, 
and  indeed  of  the  most  elementary  principles 
of  political  economy,  as  for  the  confusion  of 
its  language,  that  I  venture  to  quote  it  entire. 
You  say :  "  Labor,  we  are  told,  adds  the 
value  to  the  raw  material.  Undoubtedly  it 
does,  and  it  receives  the  price  of  the  value 
added,  in  the  form  of  wages,  which  are  dis- 
tributed   by    the   equitable    hand    of   Nature 


CAPITALIST    AXD    LABORER  49 

along  the  whole  line  of  laborers,  from  the 
miner,  say,  to  the  artisan  of  the  metal  works, 
and  from  the  grower  of  cotton  to  the  spinner ; 
not  excluding  in  either  case  the  master  by 
whom  the  works  have  been  set  up  and  by 
whose  labor  as  manager  and  the  distributer  of 
their  products  they  are  carried  on."  ^  To 
analyze  this  paragraph  closely  would  be  un- 
gracious as  well  as  unprofitable.  When  you 
say  that  labor  receives  "  the  price  of  the  value 
added  (to  the  raw  material)  in  the  form  of 
wages,"  you  surely  do  not,  can  not,  mean 
that  it  receives  in  wages  the  equivalent  of  the 
value  produced.  Yet,  if  you  do  not  mean 
that  the  argument  is  evidently  designed  to 
beg  the  whole  question.  Of  course,  labor 
does  not  get  in  the  form  of  wages  the  equiv- 
alent of  the  value  it  creates,  otherwise  there 
could  be  no  surplus  to  divide  among  the  non- 
laboring  investors.  When  you  say,  again, 
that  wages  are  "  distributed  by  the  equitable 
hand  of  Nature,"  you  surely  cannot  mean  to 
contend,  in  the  face  of  so  much  evidence  to 
the  contrary,  that  wages  are  paid  upon  any- 
thing which  can  be  called  an  "  equitable 
^  Pages  5-6.     The  italics  arc  mine. —  J.  S. 


50  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

plan."  When  an  absentee  director  receives 
for  merely  nominal  service  upon  the  director- 
ate of  a  railroad  a  salary  many  times  greater 
than  the  total  yearly  wages  of  many  a  highly 
skilled  artisan,  where,  I  ask,  is  there  any  sign 
of  equitable  division  of  the  product  of  the 
total  labor- force  expended? 
The  law  of  O^  course,  wages  are  not  the  price 
wages  ^£  ^j^^  values  created  by  the  wage- 

receivers,  but  of  their  labor-power.  And  the 
price,  the  amount  of  wages,  is  not  determined 
by  an  abstraction.  Nature,  spelled  with  a  large 
letter.  It  is  fixed  by  the  law  of  supply  and 
demand,  the  cost  of  maintaining  the  laborer 
and  his  family  at  a  reasonable  state  of  effi- 
ciency being  the  level  below  which  it  cannot 
for  long  be  forced.  Wages,  in  point  of  fact, 
bear  no  relation  whatever  to  the  amount  of 
value  created  by  the  laborer  receiving  the 
wages.  Of  course,  if  the  workers  do  not  cre- 
ate values  equal  to  and  exceeding  their  wages, 
the  wage  standard  will  be  lowered.  But  so 
far  from  wages  being  equivalent  to  the  values 
produced,  it  is  a  fact  known  to  every  econo- 
mist that  a  high  rate  of  productivity  often 
accompanies  a  low  wage  rate.     Furthermore, 


CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER  5 1 

it  has  been  conclusively  demonstrated  that 
the  American  workingman,  who  is  the 
most  productive  workingman  on  earth,  re- 
ceives a  smaller  proportion  of  his  product  in 
the  form  of  wages  than  the  workingman  of 
any  other  country  on  earth.  The  late  Lord 
Brassey,  a  capitalist  of  distinction  to  whom 
you  refer  in  your  letter  as  "  that  model  of  a 
captain  of  industry,"  ^  was  never  tired  of  em- 
phasizing this  point.  It  does  not  help  one  to 
understand  this  confused  utterance  upon  the 
law  of  wages  to  make  comparison  of  it  with 
other  references  in  your  letter  to  the  same 
subject.  While  on  page  five  wages  are  de- 
termined by  "  Nature,"  on  page  seven  it  is 
the  employer  who  fixes  their  amounts;  on 
pages  nine  and  seventeen  it  is  the  "  market." 
Despite  the  fact  that  wages  are  "  distributed 
by  the  equitable  hand  of  Nature,"  on  page 
eleven  you  say  that  "  The  masters  are  nat- 
urally combined  in  the  effort  to  keep  down 
wages,"  and  on  the  following  page  that  a 
"  large  measure  of  justice  in  the  way  of  rec- 
tification of  wages  has  been  won  by  Unionist 
effort.  .  .  ."  These  are  but  a  few  of  the 
^  Page  29. 


52  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

contradictory  statements  upon  this  important 
point  with  which  your  letter  abounds. 
Ethics  and  so-  The  capitaHst  and  the  laborer  be- 
ciai  conflict  j^^g.^  ^^  ^^^  iucautiously  admit,  en- 
gaged in  a  great  struggle,  which  you  very 
properly  call  a  "  war,"  it  seems  to  me  quite 
useless  to  attempt  to  propound  ethical  plati- 
tudes for  its  solution.  "  War  is  Hell,"  said  a 
great  American  soldier,  and  the  description 
applies  to  many  phases  of  this  modern  indus- 
trial conflict.  It  is  just  as  futile  to  preach 
kindness  and  goodwill  for  their  enemies  to 
the  combatants  on  either  side  as  it  would  be 
to  soldiers  engaged  in  a  desperate  charge. 
Of  course,  it  is  not  "  kind  "  to  shoot  a  man 
or  to  cut  him  with  a  bayonet,  but  it  is  war; 
and  of  course,  it  is  "  far  from  kind,"  as  you 
say,  to  refuse  to  work  with  non-union  men, 
but  it  is  an  act  of  war.  The  doctrine  that  a 
man  has  a  right  to  work  for  any  wage,  high 
or  low,  that  he  pleases,  or  under  any  condi- 
tions, is  not  tenable.  To  support  it,  one  must 
abandon  every  pretense  of  ethical  judgment. 
What  if  the  wage  be  insufficient  to  provide 
decently  for  those  dependent  upon  him,  and 
they  become  weak  of  body  or  mind,  or  de- 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  53 

pendent  upon  society  for  maintenance  ?  What 
if  the  hours  or  conditions  of  labor  be  such 
that  the  man  becomes  devitalized  to  such  an 
extent  that  he  is  unable  to  support  the  fam- 
ily dependent  upon  him,  or  disease  due  to  the 
conditions  of  labor  renders  him  incapable  of 
work  ?  The  doctrine  of  laisscn  faire  is  funda- 
mentally immoral.  Wages,  like  commodity 
prices  in  general,  are  governed  by  the  laws 
of  supply  and  demand,  subject  only  to  the 
cost  of  production.  The  supply  of  a  consid- 
eral^Ie  body  of  workers  in  any  industry  will- 
ing to  work  for  less  than  the  usual  rate  of 
wages,  or  to  work  for  a  greater  length  of  time 
for  the  same  wages,  tends  inevitably  to  the 
general  establishment  of  those  inferior  condi- 
tions. If  your  contention  means  anything,  it 
means  that  the  American  worker,  or  the 
worker  of  any  other  country,  must  not  resist 
the  imposition  of  low  standards  of  living  upon 
him  by  the  competition  of  workers  whose 
standards  are  low  and  undeveloped. 
Leuurean,!  ^t  is,  pcrhaps.  Only  your  general 
unwillingness  to  see  the  workers' 
side  of  the  question  that  prompts  you  to  say 
that:     "In    lands    where    Socialism    prevails 


54  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

Unions  seem  inclined  to  vote  themselves  more 
and  more  freedom  from  work  and  leisure  for 
sport,  at  the  expense  of  what  is  called  '  the 
State  ' ;  that  is  practically  the  tax-payer  or  the 
class  which  has  most  money  and  fewest 
votes.'"'  ^  I  respectfully  submit  that  this  is  a 
biased  and  unfair  statement,  wrong  both  as  to 
fact  and  its  inferences  therefrom.  Fewer 
hours  of  labor  do  not  of  necessity  mean  greater 
devotion  to  "  sport,"  though,  even  if  that  were 
true,  I  do  not  know  any  good  reason  for  oppos- 
ing the  change  on  that  account.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  to  which  the  history  of  the  movement 
for  shortening  the  daily  period  of  toil  bears 
witness,  the  added  leisure  has  been  devoted  to 
many  things  besides  sport,  and  the  character 
of  the  sports  indulged  in  has  been  greatly 
raised. 

The  Lancashire  factory-worker  of  to-day  is 
no  more  addicted  to  sport  than  his  predecessor 
of  thirty  years  or  half  a  century  ago,  but  he 
is  a  better  man  and  citizen  and  his  sports  are 
less  brutal  and  degrading.  The  American 
and  Canadian  workers  of  to-day  devote  no 
more  time  to  sports  than  the  workers  of  the 

1  Page  i6.    Italics  mine. —  J.  S. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  55 

Middle  Ages,  probably,  but  their  sports  are 
more  healthful  and  less  brutal.  The  Amer- 
ican worker  spends,  probably,  no  more  time 
on  baseball  than  the  English  worker  of  a  cen- 
tury ago  spent  on  cock-fighting,  dog-fighting 
and  other  such  brutal  sports.  He  spends  less 
time  in  drunken  debauch  and  more  time  in 
the  pursuit  of  culture.  It  is  unquestionable, 
I  think,  that  the  longer  the  average  of  the 
working-day,  and  the  lower  the  wages,  the 
more  brutalized  and  degraded  the  workers 
will  be  found  to  be.  On  the  other  hand, 
where  wages  are  highest  and  leisure  is  great- 
est, there  the  standard  of  physical,  mental  and 
moral  development  is  highest.  Further,  it  is 
not  true  to  suggest  that  taxes  are  higher  in 
consequence.  It  is  not,  I  think,  of  supreme 
importance,  but  as  a  matter  of  fact  taxes  are 
lower  in  New  Zealand  —  the  country  which 
has  gone  further  in  the  direction  of  practical 
Socialism  than  any  other  —  than  in  the  most 
backward  countries.  They  are  lower,  for  in- 
stance, than  they  are  in  Spain,  Italy,  Russia, 
or  even  poor,  benighted  India. 
FooiiHhand       ^f  prcachiug  to  the  workers  and 

futUefear*.  ^^jjjj^g   ^j^^jj.    ^^j-g   ^Jfj^   j^qj.^j    pj^^j. 


56  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

tudes  is  futile,  attempting  to  frighten  them  is 
even  more  futile  and  vain.  When  I  read 
your  solemn  warning  to  the  workingmen  and 
working-women  of  the  English-speaking 
world  against  driving  the  capital  of  the  coun- 
try away/  I  recalled  that  a  similar  cry  was 
raised  against  the  Chartists  in  England,  three- 
quarters  of  a  century  ago.  Later  on,  when 
the  trade  unions  grew  powerful  and  had  won 
legal  recognition,  it  was  urged  vVith  equal 
earnestness  against  them.  Again,  when,  in 
due  time,  the  Social  Democratic  movement 
arose  there  and  began  to  spread  its  teaching, 
the  cry  of  "  you  will  drive  away  the  capital 
of  the  country  "  was  sounded.  I  remember 
that  it  was  a  frequent  enough  experience,  in 
the  early  days  of  my  connection  with  the 
movement,  to  be  called  upon  to  reply  to  that 
awful  objection.  Many  an  English  audience 
has  enjoyed  the  contemplation  of  the  humor- 
ous spectacle  of  the  capitalists  taking  their 
capital  away  to  some  foreign  land.  But  the 
years  have  belied  that  foolish  fear,  and  the 
growth  of  the  movement  has  not  had  that  ef- 
fect in  England,  any  more  than  it  has  in  Ger- 
^Page  16. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  57 

many  where  the  Social  Democratic  Party  has 
made  such  rapid  and  constant  gains.^ 
sociaUBmuni-  Scriously,  Profcssor  Smith,  when 
versai  y^^    ^^^y.     ^bout    Capital     having 

"  wings  "  and  intimate  that  it  may  see  fit  to 
use  those  wings  to  fly  from  the  countries 
where  there  is  a  progressive  movement  of  the 
laborers,^  where  do  you  suppose  it  will  fly? 
To  China,  perhaps,  or  to  Persia,  or  India  ? 
It  would  be  hard  to  think  of  any  other  country 
in  which  it  would  not  be  met  by  a  Socialist 
movement  more  formidable  than  that  it  now 
has  to  reckon  with  in  the  great  English-speak- 
ing countries.  I  have  before  me  as  I  write 
a  chart  showing  the  relative  strength  of  So- 
cialism throughout  the  world.  Fleeing  from 
Great  Britain,  Canada  and  the  United  States, 
winged  capital  would  not  want  to  rest  in  the 

1  In  view  of  the  results  of  the  recent  elections  in  Ger- 
many, and  the  exultant  comments  of  our  American 
press  upon  the  fact  that  the  Social  Democrats  lost  sev- 
eral seats  in  the  Reichstag,  it  may  be  well  to  remind 
the  reader  that  the  "  defeat "  of  the  Socialists  so  vo- 
ciferously hailed,  was,  from  a  serious  point  of  view, 
really  a  victory.  The  party  polled  3,251,005  votes,  an 
increase  of  15  per  cent.  A  few  more  such  Pyrrhic  vic- 
tories for  the  Kaiser  would  suffice  to  end  his  rule! 

2  Page  16. 


58  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

great  English-speaking  countries  of  Austral- 
asia, for  obvious  reasons.  It  would  not  want 
to  rest  in  the  Germanic  countries  for  equally 
obvious  reasons.  In  Russia  and  the  Slav 
countries  generally  it  would  be  met  by  a 
strongly  organized  Socialist  force.  In  the 
Latin  countries  it  would  find  Socialism  a 
rapidly  growing  movement.  In  the  great 
South  African  countries  the  Socialist  cause 
is  making  progress,  and  even  in  Japan  it  is  a 
considerable  and  growing  force.  Even  in 
China,  the  battering  down  of  the  gates  of 
Pekin  let  in,  not  only  American  and  European 
capital,  but  the  inevitable  world-spirit  of  re- 
volt. The  great  works  of  Marx  have  been,  I 
am  informed,  translated  into  Chinese,  and 
their  thought  has  begun  to  leaven  the  minds 
of  Chinese  scholars  and  leaders. 
Private  prop-  I  havc  tried  often,  during  many 
abstraction  ycars,  to  imagine  the  spectacle  of 
the  capitalists  collectively  taking  their  capital 
away  to  escape  Socialism  — •  tried  to  imagine 
how  it  must  present  itself  to  those  who,  like 
yourself,  seem  to  think  it  a  probable  happen- 
ing. I  must  confess  that  I  am  completely 
baffled  whenever  I  make  the  attempt !    Would 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  59 

Mr.  Rockefeller  take  an  oil-well  under  each 
arm,  and  so  make  an  almost  endless  number 
of  trips  to  the  land  of  his  choice  and  hope? 
Would  Mr,  Vanderbilt  take  a  railway  or  two, 
Mr.  Carnegie  a  few  steel-works,  Mr.  Baer  a 
coal  mine  or  two,  and  so  on  through  the  whole 
list  of  industrial  enterprises?  How  would 
the  capitalists  divide  their  capital,  so  as  to  as- 
certain what  each  might  take  as  his  own? 
Would  a  railroad  company  with  ten  thousand 
shareholders  divide  the  number  of  station- 
buildings,  engines,  miles  of  rails,  and  so  on, 
by  the  number  of  shares  of  stock  and  give 
each  shareholders  so  many  engines,  so  many 
miles  of  steel  rails,  so  many  cars,  so  many 
station  buildings  (or  so  many  bricks!),  ac- 
cording to  the  number  of  shares?  Even  that 
could  not  be  done  justly,  for  no  single  indi- 
vidual can  properly  be  said  to  own  a  single 
brick  or  rail,  even  though  he  owns  a  tenth 
part  of  the  entire  stock  of  the  company.  At 
most,  he  owns  a  tenth  part  of  each  brick,  each 
rail,  each  bolt  or  screw.  In  the  last  analysis, 
by  far  the  greater  part  of  the  so-called  "  pri- 
vate property  "  of  capitalism  is  a  mere  ab- 
straction, and  consists  of  nothing  more  tangi- 


6o  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

ble  than  the  goodwill  of  the  community.  It 
happens  that  I  own  a  single  share  of  stock  in 
an  English  company  which  has  ten  thousand 
shareholders,  each  holding  one  share.  The 
company  owns  a  building,  and  is  a  non-divi- 
dend-paying concern.^  Suppose  I  attempt  to 
determine  my  "  property "  in  that  building, 
what  happens?  I  find  that  I  do  not  own  a 
single  brick,  stick,  or  nail.  I  own  simply  one- 
ten-thousandth  of  each  brick,  stick  and  nail, 
I  cannot  realize  my  share,  however,  for  the 
very  simple  reason  that  to  do  so  would  be  a 
physical  impossibility.  I  should  have  to  de- 
stroy the  "  property "  of  each  of  the  other 
nine  thousand,  nine  hundred  and  ninety-nine, 
and  when  I  had  done  so  I  should,  of  course, 
find  that  I  had  destroyed  my  own  with  the 
rest.  Is  my  property  in  the  building  anything 
but  an  abstraction? 
What  the  cap-  Now,  thcu,  the  Capitalist  could  not 

italists  could  ,  ,  , 

take  take  away  the  great  mass  of  ma- 

chinery and  equipment  which   I  will  call  the 
fixed   capital   to   distinguish    it   from   "  circu- 

^  This  fact  in  no  way  invalidates  the  argument  as  will 
be  seen.  The  illustration  would  be  even  stronger  were 
it  otherwise. —  J.  S. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  6 1 

lating  capital,"  money.  They  could  not  take 
the  natural  resources  of  the  country,  its  for- 
ests and  rivers,  its  great  prairies  and  fertile 
valleys,  its  wealth  of  coal,  iron,  copper,  gold, 
silver  and  other  minerals.  All  that  they  could 
by  any  possibility  take  away  would  be  as  much 
of  the  circulating  capital,  or  money,  as  they 
could  take,  and  heaps  of  documents,  share 
certificates,  deeds  of  title,  and  the  like,  useful 
under  the  circumstances  only  as  historical 
curios,  as  evidences  that  at  one  time  they 
owned  certain  abstract  "  property  rights." 
The  money,  as  money,  would  be  as  useless  as 
the  money  of  the  Southern  Confederacy  now 
is,  being  no  longer  redeemable,  and  possess 
only  its  bullion  value.  If,  from  any  country, 
capital  flies  and  labor  remains,  the  seas  and 
rivers  will  still  give  harvests  of  fish;  the  val- 
leys and  plains  will  still  bear  their  plenitude 
of  fruit  and  grain;  the  hills  will  still  yield 
their  vast  treasures  of  coal  and  other  min- 
erals; steam  and  electricity  will  still  serve 
mankind;  industry  and  the  arts  will  llourish; 
mothers  will  still  bear  and  nurse  sons  and 
daughters ;  the  song  of  contentment  and  peace 
will  rise  unto  the  starlit  skies.     Can  you  im- 


62  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

agine  this  to  be  true  if  labor  were  withdrawn 
from  the  land  and  only  capital,  however 
abundant,  left  behind?  No!  there  would  be 
desolation  and  death.  Farms  would  become 
wildernesses  and  cities  vast  graveyards,  while 
exultant  Nature  would  hide  the  mines  and 
gleaming  railway  lines  in  a  riot  of  weeds. 
The  laborer  knows  this,  knows  that  he  and  his 
fellows  are  really  not  a  class  in  the  same  sense 
as  the  capitalists  are  a  class,  but  in  very  truth 
the  world  itself.  Mrs.  Oilman  aptly  appeals 
to  this  consciousness  in  the  fine,  proud  lines: 

"  Shall  you  complain  who  feed  the  world  ? 
Who  clothe  the  world? 
Who  house  the  world? 
Shall  you  complain  who  arc  the  world, 
Of  what  the  world  may  do? 
As  from  this  hour 
You  use  your  power, 
The  world  must  follow  you !  " 

wagedoinand  Like  a  great  many  other  persons, 
lavery  y^^^  ^^^  uuablc  to  agrcc  that  the 

wage  system  involves  any  degree  of  servitude 
which  can  justly  be  called  slavery.  You  say 
that  "  No  one  in  his  cooler  moments  can  be- 
lieve that  a  man  who  is  perfectly  at  liberty 
to  dispose  of  his  own  labor  and  has  full  po- 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  63 

Htical   rights  is   a  slave."  ^     Surely,  you  are 
not   unaware   of   the    fact   that   the    so-called 
"  freedom  of  contract  "  which  the  worker  en- 
joys is  a  delusion,  and  that  it  exists  only  the- 
oretically.    In  actual   experience   the   worker 
does  not  find  himself  "  perfectly  at  liberty  to 
dispose  of  his  own  labor."     I  have  seen  men 
struggling  like  wild  beasts  outside  of  the  Lon- 
don dock  gates  for  the  right  to  work ;  outside 
of  the  Chicago  stockyards  I  have  seen  hun- 
dreds of  men  clamoring   for   work,   fighting 
for  places  of  advantage,  and,  when  the  few 
needed   were  chosen,   I   have  seen   the   many 
turn  away  with  looks  of  despair  and  anguish, 
and,  in  not  a  few  cases,  with  cries.     Theoret- 
ically, the  worker  in  most  civilized  countries 
is  free  to  dispose  of  his  labor-power.     There 
is  no  legal  institution  compelling  men  under 
normal   conditions   to   work   upon   terms   dis- 
tasteful   or    disadvantageous    to    themselves. 
But  in  actual  practice  the  opportunities  to  la- 
bor profitably  are  controlled  by  a  compara- 
tively small  number  of  persons,  who  are  thus 
enabled  to  fix  the  conditions  under  which  the 
workers  must  labor.     And  the  workers,  theo- 
1  Page  19. 


64  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

retically  free  though  they  be,  must  accept  em- 
ployment upon  these  conditions  or  starve. 
The  "free-       Of  coursc,  you  will  Say  that  un- 

dom  "  of  the         ,  ,  .  -  , 

workers  der  thcse  cnxumstances  the  work- 

ers have  the  ahernative  of  seeking  employment 
elsewhere.  But  how  will  it  be  if  there  is  no 
other  employer  in  the  neighborhood,  as  often 
happens,  especially  in  connection  with  great 
industries?  Or,  again,  how  will  it  be  if  there 
are  many  other  employers  but  none  who  de- 
sire to  employ,  having  all  the  workers  they 
can  profitably  employ?  Of  course,  they  can 
remove  to  some  other  place,  if  they  have  the 
means  to  do  so,  but  if  they  have  not  the 
means  to  move  to  distant  parts  they  must  ac- 
cept the  terms  offered  or  perish.  If  they  do 
move  to  other  parts  of  the  country,  or  to 
other  countries,  they  will  be  confronted  by  the 
same  imperative  necessity  if  the  means  of  em- 
ployment are  in  the  control  of  others.  Fur- 
ther, if  the  workers  are  married  men  with 
families  and  homes  it  is  sheer  nonsense  to  tell 
them  that  they  are  "  free  to  go  elsewhere." 
It  would  be  just  as  truthful  and  wise  to  say 
that  the  man  who  gives  up  his  watch  at  the 
demand    of   the    highwayman    who    holds    a 


CAPITALIST    AND   LABORER  65 

loaded  pistol  against  his  head  is  "  free  "  to 
refuse  the  demand  as  to  say  that  the  worker 
who  is  driven  by  economic  necessity,  the  fear 
of  hunger  for  himself  and  family,  to  accept 
harsh  terms  of  employment  is  a  "  free  man." 
So  long  as  one  man  is  master  of  another 
man's  opportunity  to  labor,  he  is  master  of 
that  man's  bread  and,  therefore,  of  his  life. 
A  concrete  I  ^^i^l  ^ake  a  coucrcte  case  that  is 
example  j^^  nowise  cxccptioual  to  illustrate 

this.  A  worker  whom  I  will  call  Jones  went 
one  day  not  long  ago  to  an  employer  whom 
I  will  call  Bones  and  asked  for  employment 
as  a  laborer.  He  was  told  that  he  could  get 
a  job  at  a  dollar  and  twenty-five  cents  a  day 
if  he  cared  to  accept  it.  Jones  accepted  the 
offer  though  he  well  knew  that  upon  such  a 
small  wage  he  could  not  support  his  wife  and 
three  children  in  decency  and  health.  Do  you 
say  that  he  accepted  it  of  his  own  "  free  will," 
that  he  was  "free  to  decline"  the  position? 
I  answer  no!  He  was  driven  by  a  force  far 
more  potent  than  a  whip  in  the  hands  of  a 
Simon  Legrce,  the  drcid  of  lumger.  At 
home  there  was  a  wife  who  cried  because  of 
the  hunger  of  her  little  ones;  there  were  empty 


66  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

cupboards  and  unpaid  bills;  there  was  the 
certainty  that  unless  the  rent  were  paid 
promptly  he  and  his  loved  ones  would  be 
forced  to  leave  their  little  tenement  dwelling. 
To  call  such  a  man  free  is  to  misuse  language 
and  violate  reason. 

I  have  known  many  instances  of  men  being 
dismissed  from  their  employment  because  they 
chose  to  exercise  the  elemental  rights  of  man- 
hood, the  right  to  follow  their  religious  or 
political  convictions,  for  example.  Thou- 
sands of  workers  in  this  great  republic  were 
dismissed  by  their  employers  because  they 
dared  to  support  Mr.  Bryan,  for  instance. 
Many  a  man  has  been  discharged  for  no  other 
reason  than  that  he  had  become  known  as  a 
Socialist.  I  could  cite  many  instances  which 
have  come  within  my  own  limited  observation 
of  men  against  whose  character  no  word  of 
reproach  could  be  uttered,  and  whose  skill  and 
efficiency  as  workmen  was  admitted,  being  dis- 
charged for  such  reasons  as  these.  It  is,  I 
believe,  unusual  to-day,  but  you  are  quite  well 
aware  of  the  fact  that  many  a  man  has  been 
discharged  from  his  employment  and  forced 
to  leave  the  town  or  village  simply  on  account 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  6/ 

of  his  religious  views,  because  he  did  not  care 
to  attend  his  employer's  church.^  This  is  the 
"  freedom  "  of  wagedom ! 
TheBertiuon  ^  ^ave  ill  my  possession  an  appli- 
"'^fr^"*"'"  cation  blank  issued  by  a  great 
workers  manufacturing      concern       which 

must  be  filled  in  by  all  who  apply  for  employ- 
ment under  the  company.  Not  only  must  the 
worker  give  a  full  account  of  his  occupation 
during  a  number  of  years  past,  with  the  names 
of  all  employers  worked  for  during  those 
years  and  the  flates  of  employment,  but  he 
must  also  sign  a  promise  nczrr  to  join  a  la- 
bor organization  ivhilc  in  the  company's  serv- 
ice! Even  while  these  pages  are  being  writ- 
ten,2  tl^g  newspapers  print  a  dispatch  from 
St.  Louis  containing  a  telegram  by  the  presi- 
dent of  a  great  trade  union  threatening  a 
strike  on  the  Southern  Pacific  Railway,  be- 
cause the  company  has  issued  an  order  that 
all  its  blacksmiths,  machinists,  boilermakers, 
carworkers,  and  other  shopworkers,  must  be 

1  Note :  The  history  of  nonconformity  in  England  in 
the  early  part  of  the  last  century,  and  even  within  my 
own   recollection,  teems  with   instances  of  this  kind. — 

J.  s. 

2  February  27,  1907. 


68  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

measured  according  to  the  Bertillon  system, 
like  so  many  criminals.  There  is  no  pretense 
that  this  is  necessary  for  the  safe  and  proper 
organization  of  the  railway.  It  is  frankly  a 
means  of  identifying  men  so  that  if  any  one 
of  them  should  at  any  time  be  dismissed  for 
agitating  among  his  fellows  to  secure  im- 
proved conditions  of  labor,  he  will  be  known 
and  effectually  barred  from  obtaining  employ- 
ment on  any  other  railroad  in  the  country. 
Do  you  imagine  that  free  Americans  would 
voluntarily  submit  to  this  outrage? 

It  was  Carlyle,  I  believe,  who  said 
siavedom  — a    that     the     wagc-workcr     differed 

comparison 

from  the  chattel  slave  ni  that  he 
was  bought  for  a  short  time  instead  of  for 
a  life  time.  There  are  other  differences,  not 
by  any  means  all  in  favor  of  the  wage- 
worker.  True,  the  wage-worker  in  the  great 
English-speaking  countries  is  endowed  with 
political  powers  which  he  can  use  if  he  will 
to  end  his  servitude  to  relentless  capital.  In 
so  far  as  this  is  true  he  is,  of  course,  in  a 
superior  position  to  that  which  the  negro  slave 
occupied.  The  chattel  slave  owner  had  to 
keep    his    slaves    in    good    condition    in    the 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  69 

"  lean "  years  as  well  as  in  the  times  of 
greater  prosperity,  but  the  modern  employer 
has  no  such  obligation  resting  upon  him.  In 
Louisiana,  before  the  war,  the  planters  hired 
gangs  of  Irish  laborers  to  do  the  heavy  and 
unhealthy  work,  because  "  It  was  much  better 
to  have  the  Irish  do  it,  who  cost  the  planter 
nothing  if  they  died,  than  to  use  up  good 
field  hands  in  such  severe  employment."  ^  In 
some  respects  the  wage-worker  is  at  a  disad- 
vantage compared  with  the  position  of  the 
chattel  slave.  Nevertheless,  I  do  not  for  a 
moment  suggest  that  a  return  to  slavery  would 
be  desirable. 
The  wisdom      If  I  havc  paid  what  seems  to  be 

of  John 

Adamii  an  undue  amount  of  attention  to 

this  question,  it  is  simply  because  the  bondage 
of  the  many  to  the  few  appears  to  me  to  be 
the  worst  feature  of  capitalist  society.  I  can- 
not but  think,  Professor  Smith,  that  you  and 
others  who  raise  a  similar  protest  against  the 
use  of  the  word  "  slave "  to  designate  the 
wage-worker  strain  violently  at  gnats  while 
you   swallow   camels   whole.     I    commend    to 

'  Phillips,     The    Economic    Cost    of    Slave-Holding, 
Polit.  Sc.  Quarterly,  .xx:27i. 


70  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

your  notice  the  wise  words  of  John  Adams, 
spoken  in  the  Continental  Congress :  "  It  is 
of  no  consequence  by  what  name  you  call  your 
people,  whether  by  that  of  freeman  or  slave. 
In  some  countries  the  laboring  poor  men  are 
called  freemen,  in  others  they  are  called  slaves, 
but  the  difference  is  imaginary  only.  What 
matters  it  whether  a  landlord  employing  ten 
laborers  on  his  farm  gives  them  annually  as 
m.uch  as  will  buy  the  necessaries  of  life  or 
gives  them  those  necessaries  at  short  hand  ?  "  ^ 
Paternalism  Your  disavowal  of  belief  in  the 
use  ess  efficacy  of  schemes  of  benevolent 

paternalism  as  a  means  of  solving  the  great 
social  problem  which  confronts  civilization  is 
most  welcome  to  the  Socialist.  With  your 
broad  vision  of  life,  your  extensive  memories, 
and  your  experience  with  all  sorts  and  condi- 
tions of  men  and  women,  you  know  how  vain 
and  abortive  such  schemes  are.  The  fable 
of  the  dog  with  the  golden  chain  and  collar 
illustrates  very  well  a  phase  of  human  psy- 
chology. Mankind  would  rather  be  free  to 
walk,  even  though  the  pathway  chosen  be  full 

1  Quoted    by    Simons,    Class    Struggles  in    America, 
Third   Edition,  p.  27. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  J I 

of  Stones  and  thorns,  than  be  led  in  paths  of 
others'  choosing,  even  though  these  be  strewn 
with  flowers.  If  freedom  and  beauty  in  Hfe 
are  ever  to  be  reahzed  by  the  people,  the 
realization  must  come  from  their  common  ex- 
perience; it  cannot  be  handed  down  to  them. 
While  you  see  the  futility  of  benevolent  pa- 
ternalism clearly  enough,  you  nevertheless 
seem,  like  a  great  many  other  earnest  and 
thoughtful  observers  of  social  conditions,  to 
believe  in  Comte's  idea  of  the  "  moralization 
of  capital."  You  seem  to  believe  that  kind- 
ness and  considerateness  on  the  part  of  the 
employers  for  their  employees  will  remove  an- 
tagonism and  make  for  social  harmony  and 
industrial  peace.  That  this  hope  is  vain  and 
delusive  is  my  profound  conviction.  The 
very  nature  of  capital  as  the  agency  by  which 
one  class  exploits  and  rules  the  other  class 
in  society,  makes  it  impossible  that  there 
should  be  peace  so  long  as  capital  bears  that 
relation  to  the  laborer.  That  your  letter  is 
intended  to  serve  as  a  plea  for  mediation  and 
goodwill  between  the  warring  forces  is  evi- 
dent, and  I  yield  to  no  one  in  my  admiration 
for  the  high  sense  of  civic  duty  and  earnest 


72  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

patriotism  which  inspired  it.  Still,  I  cannot 
persuade  myself  —  and  I  have  examined  the 
question  in  the  light  of  history  and  personal 
experience  —  that  the  result  of  it,  and  all  ap- 
peals of  its  kind,  can  be  other  than  baleful 
and  wrong.  To  cry  peace  when  there  is  no 
peace  possible  is  worse  than  useless :  it 
clouds  the  real  issue,  befogs  the  minds  of  the 
masses,  and  restrains  many  from  taking  a 
definite  stand  upon  the  side  of  what  they  be- 
lieve to  be  the  Right.  The  total  result  is  to 
dam  back,  as  it  were,  the  stream  of  progress 
until  it  bursts  the  dam  with  irresistible  force 
and  overwhelms  society  by  a  flood  of  hateful 
passion. 

The  bogey  of  ^^  ^^  uot  strauge  that  one  whose 
bureaucracy  memory  covcrs  so  long  a  period  as 
your  own  should  fail  to  distinguish  between 
the  Socialism  of  to-day  and  the  Utopian  So- 
cialism of  an  earlier  generation.  Remember- 
ing the  "  colonies,"  "  phalanxes,"  and  other" 
formal  schemes  for  social  reconstruction  in 
which  all  the  minutest  details  of  life  were  pro- 
vided for  in  elaborate  schedules  and  codes,  it 
is  easy  to  understand  your  misconception  of 
the  Socialist  movement  of  to-day;  your  idea 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  73 

of  a  great  bureaucracy  governing  the  whole 
of  hfe  with  an  inflexible  despotism.  That  is 
the  conception  which  lies  back  of  your  chal- 
lenge to  the  Socialists,  demanding  to  know 
whether,  and  how,  they  can  devise  a  govern- 
ment so  omniscient  as  to  be  able  to  choose 
and  appoint  some  men  to  poets,  artists,  in- 
ventors and  philosophers  and  other  men  to  be 
laborers,  mariners,  artisans,  farmers,  and  so 
on.  Your  challenge  summarizes  the  concep- 
tion of  numerous  superficial  critics  so  admir- 
ably that,  notwithstanding  that  it  has  been  an- 
swered hundreds  of  times,  by  Socialists  and 
non-Socialists  alike,  I  quote  it  in  full : 

"  Socialism  has  never  told  us  distinctly,  if 
it  has  tried  to  tell  us  at  all,  what  its  form  of 
government  is  to  be.  Can  it  devise  a  gov- 
ernment which  shall  hold  all  the  instruments 
of  production,  distribute  our  industrial  parts, 
yet  leave  us  free?  Without  freedom  and  per- 
sonal choice  of  callings,  how  could  there  be 
progress,  how  could  there  be  invention,  how 
could  there  be  dedication  to  intellectual  pur- 
suits? Can  the  government  pick  out  invent- 
ors, scientific  discoverers,  philosophers,  men 
of  letters,  artists,  set  them  to  work  and  as- 


74  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

sign  them  their  reward?  By  what  standard 
will  it  measure  remuneration?  The  products 
of  manual  labor  it  might  conceivably  meas- 
ure; but  apparently  those  alone."  ^ 
sociausm  and  The  auswcr  to  your  questions,  and 
the  individual  ^^  ^|j  ^^^  unuttered  fears  implied 

by  them,  is  that  modern  Socialism,  this  great 
world-circling  political  Socialism,  involves  the 
creation  of  no  such  bureaucracy.  It  does  not 
comprehend  the  destruction  of  private  prop- 
erty, but  only  the  socialization  of  such  prop- 
erty, and  such  agents  of  production,  as  are  in 
their  very  nature  social,  and  which  in  private 
hands  menace  the  common  interests  and  good. 
It  does  not  involve  the  destruction  of  per- 
sonal liberty  and  the  creation  of  a  despotic 
State,  but  proposes  to  leave  the  choice  of  oc- 
cupation to  the  individual  with  no  other  re- 
strictions than  the  law  of  supply  and  demand 
and  the  laws  of  social  self-protection  necessi- 
tate. It  does  propose  to  guarantee  to  every 
citizen  an  opportunity  to  earn  an  honest  liv- 
ing, without  degradation  and  with  leisure  to 
enjoy  life.  These  rights  are  fundamental  to 
life  :— 
1  Page  27.    Italics  mine. —  J.  S. 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  75 

"  And  the  right  of  a  man  to  labor  and  his  right  to  labor 

in  joy  — 
Not  all  your  laws  can  deny  that  right,  nor  the  gates  of 

Hell  destroy !  " 

Socialism  does  not  propose  to  surround  life 
with  a  network  of  laws  in  the  vain  hope  that 
it  will  make  men  perfect  and  remodel  human 
nature  by  legal  enactment,  but  it  does  pro- 
pose to  destroy,  as  far  as  that  is  possible  for 
collective  effort,  all  those  anti-social  conditions 
which  compel  men  to  live  vain,  hopeless,  sor- 
did, brutal  and  unworthy  lives.  It  does  not 
expect,  nor  will  it  attempt,  to  override  the 
great  laws  of  human  nature  and  make  men 
equal,  but  it  does  make  the  proposal  that  all 
those  things  which  deny  equal  opportunities 
and  create  unnatural  inequalities  should  be 
destroyed.  It  claims  for  every  child  born  into 
the  world  its  heirship  to  all  the  vast  resources 
of  wisdom  and  knowledge  so  painfully  gath- 
ered by  the  race  through  long  ages;  it  claims 
for  every  child  equal  opportunity  for  the 
fullest  and  freest  development  of  all  its 
powers,  leaving  only  natural  inequalities  to 
manifest  themselves.  That  is  the  "  Equality  " 
of  Socialism.  To  be  yet  more  specific,  the  form 


76  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

The  Socialist  ^f  government  at  which  Sociahsm 
aims,  the  form  of  government  es- 
sential to  its  very  existence,  is  a  complete  politi- 
cal democracy,  resting  on  the  broad  basis  of 
adult  suffrage.  It  thus  elevates  woman  to  the 
plane  of  political  and.  social  equality  with  man. 
Industrially,  the  State  —  no  longer  represen- 
tative of  a  class  but  of  the  whole  nation  — 
will  be  as  democratic  as  it  is  politically.  The 
State  will  not  seek  to  own  all  the  agents  of 
production  and  distribution  and  to  extinguish 
private  property  and  private  industry,  but  it 
will  take  the  great  agencies  of  life  upon  which 
all  depend,  and  the  ownership  and  direction  of 
which  by  private  enterprise  is  shown  to  be 
impossible  without  injury  to  society  —  the 
things  which  can  only  be  used  by  individuals 
as  means  of  exploiting  other  individuals  — 
and  bring  them  under  the  direction  of  a  truly 
democratic  rule  of  the  workers  engaged  in 
them  and  the  representatives  of  the  commun- 
ity. It  will  thus  set  a  standard  of  remunera- 
tion, conditions  of  labor  and  leisure  time  which 
private  enterprise  must  accept  if  it  is  to  con- 
tinue to  exist.  On  the  other  hand,  no  Social- 
ist is  foolish  enough  to  believe  that  collective 


CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER  "JJ 

ownership  will  continue  if  it  does  not  prove 
superior  to  private  ownership  in  its  efficiency. 
Socialism  seeks  no  privileges:  it  does  not 
fear  the  competition  of  private  industry. 
Here,  then,  is  strong  ground  for  its  appeal; 
it  is  capitalism  which  fears  the  test  and 
shrinks  from  it.^ 

Means  of  ^ou  Esk  how  this  changc  will  be 
realization  bj-Qught  about,  and  the  question  is 
both  natural  and  fair.  Yet,  neither  I  nor 
any  living  being  can  answer  it  in  definite 
terms.  This  much  is  certain:  when  the  re- 
sults of  capitalist  ownership  and  rule  prove 
so  oppressive  that  they  are  no  longer  en- 
durable, the  goodwill  which  constitutes  the 
very  soul  of  capitalist  property  will  be  with- 
drawn. The  collective  will,  expressed  in  le- 
gal form,  will  demand  the  assumption  by  the 
body  politic  and  social  of  any  and  all  things 
which  its  own  safety  and  welfare  require.  It 
may  pension  some  owners;  it  may  buy  some 
properties  under  those  powers  of  domain  and 
ultimate  ownership  which  underlie  the  juris- 

n  have  discussed  this  question  at  length  in  my  "So- 
cialism, a  Summary  and  Interpretation  of  Socialist  Prin- 
ciples (1906),  chapter  IX. 


78  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

prudence  of  every  civilized  society.^  Or,  if 
it  chooses  to  do  so,  it  may  simply  assume  the 
functions  of  production  or  distribution  exer- 
cised by  the  private  owners,  without  touching 
anything   they   own,    and   so    accomplish    the 

1  Note :  There  is  of  course,  no  such  a  thing  as  an 
absolute  right  to  property  of  any  kind  except  this  ulti- 
mate social  right  to  which  I  refer.  In  the  case  of  land, 
this  is  well  known.  The  power  of  municipalities  and 
states  to  take  land  (at  their  own  valuation  in  many 
cases,  for  public  purposes,  such  as  the  building  of  hos- 
pitals, the  making  of  public  parks,  roads,  and  so  on, 
even  though  the  nominal  owners  of  the  land  do  not 
want  to  sell  it,  illustrates  this  point  clearly.  Even  where 
the  land  is  wanted  by  a  private  corporation,  for  build- 
ing a  railway,  for  instance,  these  powers  are  frequently 
exercised.  The  same  principle  holds  good  of  every 
form  of  property  rights,  though  the  fact  is  often  lost 
sight  of.  Taxation  is  a  common  form  of  confiscation. 
The  power  exercised  in  war-time  of  taking  food  or 
other  supplies  is  another.  Under  the  police  powers  of 
every  civilized  country  in  case  of  serious  accident  or 
disaster  the  home  of  any  citizen,  and  whatever  it  con- 
tains, may  be  lawfully  seized  and  used.  Suppose  the 
owner  of  a  supply  of  food  or  drugs,  or  any  other  neces- 
sity of  life,  should  have  clung  to  them  in  San  Francisco 
at  the  time  of  the  disastrous  earthquake  and  fire,  does 
any  sane  person  believe  that  he  would  have  been  per- 
mitted to  enforce  his  '  rights '  against  the  urgent  need 
of  the  community?  In  the  last  analysis,  I  repeat,  pri- 
vate property  is  a  pure  abstraction,  resting  solely  upon 
the  good  will  of  the  community. 


CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER  79 

desired  end.  To  illustrate:  Suppose  the 
community  decides  that  its  best  interests  will 
be  served  by  establishing  its  own  system  of 
transportation,  and  either  the  existing  owners 
decline  to  sell  at  a  reasonable  price,  or  the 
community  decides  that  there  would  be  no 
advantage  in  taking  the  '  plant '  of  the  exist- 
ing owners.  Under  the  circumstances  it 
might  pursue  precisely  the  same  policy  as  the 
capitalists  have  themselves  always  pursued  and 
establish  its  own  plant.  What  would  happen 
would  be  simply  this,  that  without  confis- 
cating a  single  item  of  property  it  would  have 
destroyed  every  single  fraction  of  the  value 
hitherto  owned  by  the  private  company,  ex- 
cept, of  course,  the  sum  its  now  useless  things 
would  bring  at  the  junk  dealers'.  There 
can  be  no  question,  it  seems  to  me,  that,  given 
the  will  to  socialize  any  function  of  produc- 
tion or  distribution,  society  has  full  power  to 
do  so. 

chartty  versus  ^^^t^""'"?"  '""  Y^"^  letter,  Profcssor 
juHtice  Smith,  is  so  disquieting  as  the  ac- 

ceptance of  the  pernicious  doctrine  that  Char- 
ity can  take  the  place  of  Justice  in  our  social 
economy.     When   you   say  that   the  evil   re- 


80  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

suiting  from  the  accumulation  of  vast  for- 
tunes "  is  partly  balanced  by  large  benefac- 
tions to  public  institutions,"  ^  you  give  your 
support  to  one  of  the  greatest  lies  of  our  age. 
Victor  Hugo  it  was,  I  believe,  who  declared 
that  "  the  rich  will  do  anything  for  the  poor 
except  get  off  their  backs."  Yet,  so  long  as 
they  continue  to  exploit  the  poor  they  cannot 
do  any  effective  good  by  charity.  The  large 
benefactions  to  public  institutions  which  you 
refer  to  do  not  lessen  the  wrongs  existing,  but 
tend  rather  to  increase  them.  The  very  idea 
of  private  individuals  assuming  social  func- 
tions is  fundamentally  unjust  and  wrong. 
There  is  a  legitimate  sphere  for  private  phil- 
anthropy, the  sphere  of  experiment.  But  be- 
yond this  stage  philanthropy  ought  never  to 
go.  If  I  go  into  a  city  and  see  a  beautiful 
public  library,  or  an  art  museum  filled  with 
rare  treasures  of  art,  the  library  or  museum 
ought  to  express  to  me  a  certain  amount  of 
general  culture  in  the  community.  In  point 
of  fact,  under  present  conditions,  they  express 
nothing  of  the  sort,  but  merely  the  fact  that 
Mr.  Carnegie  or  some  other  millionaire  has 
1  Page  29. 


CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER  bl 

been  permitted  to  assume  social  responsibili- 
ties and  duties.  Similarly,  a  public  hospital 
ought  to  be  a  concrete  expression  of  the  hu- 
manitarian spirit  of  the  citizens,  of  their  re- 
gard for  their  less  fortunate  fellows,  but  is 
to-day,  in  many  cases,  nothing  more  than  a 
monument  of  the  neglect  of  those  things  by 
the  public  and  the  fact  that  private  individuals 
have  done,  in  the  name  of  Charity,  what  the 
community  ought  to  have  done  in  the  name  of 
Justice.  That  charity  weakens  the  moral 
fibre  of  the  individual  who  becomes  depen- 
dent upon  it,  frequently  doing  far  more  harm 
than  it  can  possibly  undo,  is  admitted.  So 
it  is  in  the  case  of  communities.  Many  of 
our  cities  and  towns  have  been  pauperized  by 
the  "  large  benefactions  to  public  institu- 
tions," by  which  our  great  multimillionaires 
seek  to  salve  their  consciences,  and,  inci- 
dentally, to  quiet  the  popular  discontent, 
ourneodof  ^  would  uot  havc  my  position 
Charity  upou    this   matter    misunderstood. 

I  do  not  blame  the  philanthropist.  I  do  not 
douljt  that  in  many  instances  they  are  actuated 
by  entirely  laudable  desires.  Indeed,  I  honor 
the  spirit  which  prompts  a  man  to  give  part  of 


82  CAPITALIST    AND    LABORER 

his  surplus  wealth  to  relieve  suffering  and 
misery,  or  to  aid  others  to  obtain  knowledge 
and  emancipate  themselves  from  misery.  But 
I  cannot  close  my  eyes  to  the  fact  that  this 
is  the  richest  country  in  the  world,  and  that 
there  must  be  something  wrong  with  the  so- 
cial system  which  jiecessitates  private  philan- 
throphy  upon  the  gigantic  scale  of  to-day.  In 
the  richest  country  of  the  world,  with  re- 
sources of  fabulous  richness,  where  the  peo- 
ple feel  the  need  of  libraries  they  must  wait 
in  patience  until  Mr.  Carnegie  makes  up  his 
mind  to  give  them  libraries  for  presents,  and 
as  monuments  to  his  exaggerated  egoism. 
Feeling  the  need  of  money  for  educational 
purposes,  we  must  wait  for  Mr.  Rockefeller  to 
give  it  out  of  his  vast  hoard.  In  our  richest 
and  greatest  city,  notwithstanding  the  most 
awful  need  of  a  lying-in  hospital,  we  wit- 
nessed the  spectacle  of  the  city  waiting  help- 
lessly until  Mr.  Morgan  saw  fit  to  build  one 
at  his  private  expense.  Yet,  Mr.  Carnegie, 
Mr.  Rockefeller  and  Mr.  Morgan,  like  all 
others  of  their  type,  draw  all  they  give  in  this 
manner  from  the  labor  and  life  of  the  com- 
munity.    Because  society  condones  the  wrong 


CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER  83 

of  private  exploitation  of  public  resources,  it 
must  condone  the  further  wrong  of  substitut- 
ing private  philanthropy  for  social  justice. 
Socialism  and  I  ^^  uot  appeal  to  jou  to  joiu  the 
youth  Socialist      movement,      Professor 

Smith.  It  is  a  melancholy  reflection  that  lit- 
tle good  could  accrue  to  the  Socialist  cause 
as  a  result  of  such  a  step  on  your  part  at  this 
late  day.  Your  splendid  career  lies  in  the 
Past,  a  monument  of  civic  loyalty  and  un- 
selfish devotion  to  the  common  good.  But 
Socialism  is  for  the  Future.  Therefore,  I 
look  to  the  younger  men  and  women  who  have 
been  influenced  by  your  life  and  work,  and 
who  may  attach  much  importance  to  your 
utterance  against  Socialism.  I  seek  and  hope 
to  convince  them  that  Socialism  is  the  only 
ideal  worthy  of  their  service  and  devotion. 
To  their  unshaken  faith,  unsullied  hope  and 
unbounded  enthusiasm  I  appeal  against  the 
skepticism  and  unfaith  of  age  with  its  back- 
ward vision.  I  appeal  to  them  to  recognize 
the  fact  that  to  "  acquiesce  in  our  industrial 
system,"  even  provisionally,  as  you  counsel 
them  to  do,'  is  to  deny  righteousness  and  to 
1  Page  38. 


84  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

compromise  with  wrong,  I  appeal  to  them  to 
face  the  stern  fact  that  acquiescence  with 
capitaHsm  is  nothing  less  than  binding  the 
soul  of  Truth  to  Mammon's  altar  and  muz- 
zling the  spirit  of  Truth  in  the  Temple  of 
Life. 

Thebught  I  see  the  bosom  of  the  earth 
of  capitalism  biightened  and  reddened  with 
blood  by  wars  made  in  the  name  of  capitalism ; 
I  see  genius,  beauty  and  love  strangled  in  a 
cruel,  Stygian  quagmire  of  poverty  in  the  name 
of  that  same  capitalism ;  I  see  childhood  bound 
to  wheels,  the  purity  of  womanhood  and  the 
strength  of  manhood  ravished  and  destroyed 
for  capitalism  and  the  privilege  of  the  few. 
And  seeing  these  things,  and  unutterable 
things  worse  than  these,  which  every  open- 
minded  man  and  woman  may  see,  I  denounce 
the  advice  to  acquiesce  in  them  as  an  outrage 
upon  the  spirit  of  Truth,  an  unholy  alliance 
with  the  powers  of  Evil,  a  blasphemy  against 
God  and  all  that  is  noble  and  good  in  life. 
Acauto  I    turn,    then,    to   the   young  and 

the  young  pj^^^    ^^,j^j^    ^j^^^^^    ^^^   ^    ^^^j^^    ^^^ 

better  ideal,  and  a  worthier  purpose  in  life 
than  acquiescence  with  the  system  of  greed. 


CAPITALIST   AND   LABORER  85 

ignorance  and  sordidness.  I  stand  upon  the 
broad  platform  of  Mazzini's  religious  faith, 
and,  adopting  his  very  words,  say  to  the 
young  men  and  women  of  to-day  to  whom  this 
great  sphinx-riddle  of  the  social  problem  ap- 
peals, and  upon  whom  the  responsibility  of  its 
solution  must  devolve: 

Mazzini'8  *'  You  wcrc  first  slaves,  then  serfs. 
words  Kow     you     are     hirelings.     You 

have  emancipated  yourselves  from  slavery  and 
from  serfdom.  Why  should  you  not  emanci- 
pate yourselves  from  the  yoke  of  hire,  and 
become  free  producers,  and  masters  of  the 
totality  of  production  which  you  create? 
Wherefore  should  you  not  accomplish, 
through  your  own  peaceful  endeavors  and  the 
assistance  of  a  society  having  sacred  duties 
towards  each  of  its  members,  the  most  beauti- 
ful revolution  that  can  be  conceived  —  a  revo- 
lution which,  accepting  labor  as  the  commer- 
cial basis  of  human  intercourse,  and  the  fruits 
of  labor  as  the  basis  of  property,  should  grad- 
ually abolish  the  class  distinctions  and  tyranni- 
cal dominion  of  one  element  of  labor  over 
another,  and  by  proclaiming  one  sole  law  of 
just  equilibrium  between  production  and  con- 


86  CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 

sumption,  harmonize  and  unite  all  the  children 
of  the  country,  the  common  mother  ?  ^ 
The  claim  of    ^^^   that    Socialism    asks    of   any 
Socialism         ^^^^^    j^    ^    Candid    and    unbiased 

investigation  of  its  principles,  an  honest 
study  of  its  claims,  and  that  is  a  duty  which 
every  true  man  owes  to  himself,  which  every 
patriotic  citizen  owes  to  his  country.  The 
Socialist  movement  embraces  too  many  mil- 
lions of  earnest  men  and  women  in  all  lands, 
among  them  the  most  illustrious  leaders  in 
Art,  Science,  Literature  and  Politics,  to  per- 
mit any  intelligent  person  to  ignore  it.  In 
the  firm  conviction  that  the  claims  of  Social- 
ism are  just  and  true,  and  believing  that  to 
neglect  its  study  is  to  stultify  self  and  wrong 
society,  I  urge  the  readers  of  these  pages  to 
become  acquainted  with  its  literature,  and, 
equally,  with  the  literature  of  the  opposition 
to  it,  weighing  the  pros  and  cons  with  open 
minds,  bent  only  upon  the  realization  of  the 
truth.  Read  the  best  literature,  for  Social- 
ism and  against  it,  in  the  spirit  of  the  sage 
advice  of  Lord  Verulam :  "  Read  not  to  con- 
tradict and  confute,  nor  to  believe  and  take 
1  On  the  Duties  of  Man. 


CAPITALIST   AND    LABORER 


87 


for  granted,  nor  to  find  talk  and  discourse,  but 
to  weigh  and  consider." 

Faithfully  yours, 


PART  TWO 

MODERN   SOCIALISM 

A  lecture  delivered  at  the  New  York  School 
of  Philanthropy,  March  7th.,  1907 


89 


NOTE 

In  the  comments  upon  Mr.  Mallock's  utterances  con- 
tained in  the  following  pages  I  have  tried  to  be  abso- 
lutely fair  to  that  gentleman.  It  is  not  always  possi- 
ble, however,  to  be  quite  certain  as  to  the  meaning  of 
Mr.  Mallock's  incoherent  and  contradictory  statements. 
On  the  one  hand  he  accuses  Marx  and  his  Socialist 
followers  of  teaching  that  "  wealth  is  produced  by  man- 
ual labor  alone,"  while,  on  the  other  hand,  in  summing 
up  the  very  first  of  his  lectures,  he  laments  that  "At 
present  the  orthodox  economists  and  the  Socialistic 
economists  alike  give  us  all  human  effort  tied  up,  as  it 
were,  in  a  sack  and  ticketed  '  human  labor.' "  Both 
statements,  it  is  very  obvious,  cannot  possibly  be  true. 

Again,  the  confusion  of  thought  and  language  in 
Mr.  Mallock's  arguments  are  such  that,  even  when  he 
defines  his  term,  the  "  definitions  "  are  absolutely  unin- 
telligible and  add  to  the  general  obscurity.  He  defines 
labor,  for  instance,  in  the  following  words:  "Labor 
means  the  faculties  of  the  individual  applied  to  his  own 
labor."  If  this  sentence  was  intended  to  mean  any- 
thing at  all,  the  fact  does  not  appear.  In  a  great  Amer- 
ican University,  a  highly  culttured  audience  is  gravely 
informed  that  labor  means  "  faculties  applied  to  labor !  " 

More  than  ten  years  ago,  while  residing  in  England, 
I  found  some  intellectual  diversion  in  touring  the  coun- 
try amusing  myself,  and,  I  hope,  others,  by  puncturing 
the  airy  bubbles  which  Mr.  Mallock's  verbosity  blew 
across  the  pathway  of  our  Socialist  propaganda.  Utter- 
ly discredited  in  England,  the  naivete  of  the  National 
Civic  Federation  of  America  has  given  him  a  new 
lease  of  life,  and  American  Socialists  may  indulge  in 
the  amusing  pastime  of  pricking  Mr.  Mallock's  bub- 
bles.—J.  S. 

90 


MODERN  SOCIALISM 

Assmnption  on  I  am  lionorcd  by  the  invitation  to 

which  lecture  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 

is  based  acldress  you  today  upon  the  sub- 

ject of  Modern  Socialism.  When  I  received 
the  very  courteous  invitation  of  Dr.  Devine, 
in  response  to  which  I  am  present  this  morn- 
ing, I  had  no  idea  that  the  gentlemen  who 
comprise  that  very  interesting  body,  the  Na- 
tional Civic  Federation,  were  to  resurrect 
from  his  comparative  oblivion  in  England  the 
genial  Mr.  Mallock  and  import  him  to  dis- 
cuss Socialism  in  some  of  our  great  American 
Universities.  It  seemed  to  me  at  the  time 
best  to  assume  that  most  of  you  would  be 
quite  ignorant  of  the  subject,  notwithstand- 
ing the  fact  that  almost  every  one  of  you  may 
have  graduated  from  some  college  or  uni- 
versity. I  could  not  hope  that  any  consider- 
able number  of  you  would  know  more  about 
the  great  subject  of  Socialism  than  the  aver- 
age professor,  and  it  seemed  best,  therefore, 
91 


92  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

to  frame  my  lecture  upon  the  assumption  that 
you  would  have  no  correct  ideas  about  So- 
cialism and  the  Socialist  movement,  such  ideas 
as  you  might  have  being  incorrect  and  mis- 
leading. 
Rir.  Mauook's    Sincc  tlicu  you  havc,  I  hope,  all 

disingenuous-  i  t 

ness  read  or  listened  to  the  lectures  of 

Mr.  Mallock.  Yet,  with  all  deference  to  an 
ingenious  and  mildly  interesting  opponent,  I 
cannot  think  that  you  are  any  wiser  for  the 
experience.  It  would,  I  think,  be  almost  im- 
possible for  any  person  to  add  to  his  or  her 
stock  of  correct  information  about  Socialism 
as  a  result  of  sitting  under  Mr.  Mallock's  in- 
struction, wherefore  I  shall  stick  to  my  or- 
iginal intention  of  assuming  that  most  of  you 
have  very  erroneous  notions  about  Socialism 
and  that  few  of  you  have  any  correct  ideas 
about  it.  You  may  have  noticed  that,  like  a 
certain  class  of  theologians,  Mr.  Mallock  de- 
voted his  time  to  a  textual  criticism  of  de- 
tached passages  from  the  writings  of  Karl 
Marx.  That  many  of  these  criticisms  be- 
trayed a  lack  of  ingenuousness  not  uncom- 
mon among  controversialists,  and  to  which 
harsh   words  might  be  not  unjustly  applied, 


MODERN   SOCIALISM  93 

is  true,  but  that  is  not  the  most  important 
criticism  I  would  make.  What  I  would  have 
you  observe  today  is  that  Socialism  in 
America  cannot  be  destroyed  or  hindered  by 
the  method  Mr.  Mallock  has  adopted.  Marx 
wrote  half  a  century  ago,  and  while  there 
can  be  no  doubt  of  the  vast  influence  of  his 
work  upon  the  Socialist  thought  of  our  time, 
it  is  not  a  very  difficult  task  to  show  that  he 
was  fallible.  Because  he  was  human  he 
could  not  well  be  otherwise.  There  is  a 
younger  school  of  Socialist  writers,  of  which 
I  am  proud  to  be  a  very  humble  member, 
which  our  opponents  must  deal  with  if  they 
would  touch  the  Socialism  of  to-day,  or  do 
more  effective  work  than  make  straw  men  to 
knock  them  down  with  academic  gravity. 
The  test  of  our  opponents'  sincerity  and 
courage  will  be  their  willingness  or  otherwise 
to  place  at  the  disposal  of  the  Socialists  the 
facilities  given  to  Mr.  Mallock.  It  will  be,' 
too,  something  of  a  test  of  the  integrity  and 
freedom  from  bias  of  our  great  universities. 
So  much  I  say  by  way  of  prelude :  Com- 
ing to  the  subject  of  to-day's  lecture,  I  shall 
not  weary   you    with   textual   expositions   of 


94  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

Marxian  or  other  formulas,  nor  with  an 
academic  phraseology  that  is  at  once  foreign 
and  archaic.  In  the  simplest  language  I  can 
command,  I  hope  to  make  quite  plain  the 
essential  feautres  of  the  Socialism  of  to-day 
as  we  American  Socialists  conceive  it. 
The  word  The  word  "  Socialism  "  was  first 
hocia    m        ^^g^^   -^   jg^^  l^y  ^1^^  disciples  of 

Robert  Owen,  the  great  English  philanthro- 
pist. It  was  used  to  designate  Owen's  scheme 
of  universal  cooperation  at  first,  and  was 
gradually  adopted  as  the  name  for  all  Utopian 
dreams  and  experiments  from  Plato's  Repub- 
lic to  Bellamy's  Looking  Backward.  But, 
while  we  have  retained  the  word  to  desig- 
nate our  ideas  and  ideals,  there  is  no  other 
relation  between  those  universally  dreamed 
Utopian  visions  and  modern  Socialism.  The 
relation,  or  lack  of  relation,  between  the  two 
has  been  aptly  likened  to  that  of  the  ancient 
alchemy  to  the  chemistry  of  to-day. 
Three  phases  ^^'^  may  cousidcr  present  day  So- 
of  the  subject  sialism  from  three  quite  distinct 
points  of  view.     We  may  consider  it  as: 

( 1 )  A  theory   of  social   evolution 

(2)  A  system  of  political  economy 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  95 

(3)  A  social  ideal 
While  these  are  quite  distinct  points  of  view 
from  which  we  may  consider  Socialism,  any- 
extensive  observations  from  them  must  inev- 
itably merge  themselves  together,  forming  a 
sociological  synthesis  which  is  frequently 
spoken  of  as  "  Scientific  Socialism."  I  pro- 
pose to  sketch  a  suggestive  outline  of  Socialist 
theory  under  each  of  the  three  heads. 
Social  Evoin-  (0  ^^  «  fJicory  of  social  evolu- 
"*"*  tion  Socialism  has  for  its  primary 

postulate  the  necessity  of  the  constant  change 
and  growth  of  the  social  organism.  In  olden 
times  men  regarded  the  social  state  as  a 
static  thing,  but  to-day,  thanks  to  a  host  of 
thinkers  in  the  realms  of  biology  and  soci- 
ology, men  like  Comte,  Lyell,  Darwin,  Spen- 
cer, Lewis  H.  Morgan,  Bachofen,  Sir  Henry 
Maine,  and  numerous  others  whose  names  will 
doubtless  occur  to  you,  the  idea  of  social 
evolution  is  a  firmly  established  one.  Thanks 
to  the  patient  labors  of  these  great  thinkers, 
it  is  now  possible  to  trace  the  evolution  of  the 
human  race  and  to  mark  that  evolution  into 
fairly  definite  epochs.  Morgan,  Maine,  Lub- 
bock, and  others,  have  shown  the  long  period 


96  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

of  savagedom  through  which  primitive  races 
lived  without  any  idea  of  private  property,  in 
a  rude,  savage,  tribal  communism.  They 
have  shown  the  rise  of  slavery,  historically 
the  first  form  of  private  property  known  to 
the  human  race,  while  other  writers  have 
traced  with  greater  wealth  of  detail  the  modi- 
fication of  slavery  and  the  rise  of  serfdom  in 
a  feudal  society.  The  passing  of  that  feudal- 
ism with  its  branded  serfs,  and  the  rise  of 
capitalistic  society  with  its  wage-laborers  in- 
stead of  serfs,  is  a  page  of  history  so  recent 
that  its  documentary  records  are  open  to  each 
of  us.  So  recent  is  it,  indeed,  that  even  those 
of  us  who  have  not  yet  reached  the  meridian 
of  life  have  been  privileged  to  see  some  rem- 
nants of  the  old  feudalism  existing  alongside 
of  the  new  form  of  social  organization,  as  in 
the  Slavic  countries  of  Europe,  and  to  witness 
the  last  desperate  struggle  of  the  feudal  rem- 
nant against  extinction. 

Recent  ^^  ^^^  owu  time,  wc  who  are  still 

changes  youug    havc    witucsscd    a    great 

transformation  in  the  social  and  industrial  life 
of  the  world.  We  have  seen  the  development 
of  new  agents  of  production  like  electricity, 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  97 

the  passing  of  competition  in  industry  and 
commerce,  and  the  rapid  and  extensive  con- 
centration of  capital  in  commerce  and  indus- 
try. Our  own  experience,  therefore,  confirms 
the  doctrine  of  the  gradual  evolution  of  so- 
ciety, and  we  could  not,  in  view  of  that  ex- 
perience, believe  in  the  possibility  of  an  im- 
mediate realization  of  the  millenium  as  the 
result  of  adopting  some  scheme  of  social  or- 
ganization, even  if  we  would. 
Economic  Now,  the  distiuctivc  features  of 
evo*iution  the  Socialist  theory  of  social  evo- 
lution, as  distinguished  from  other  theories,  is 
the  so-called  "  materialistic  conception  of  his- 
tory," formulated  by  j\Iarx  and  his  great  co- 
worker, Friederich  Engels.  The  essence  of 
this  theory,  its  root  principle,  is  that  the  main 
impelling  force  in  human  progress,  the  force 
which  to  a  large  extent  determines  the  time 
and  character  of  the  changes  in  social  organ- 
ization which  we  call  the  epochs  of  history, 
is  economic,  rising  out  of  the  methods  of 
producing  and  distributing  wealth.  Slave- 
labor  broke  up  the  pre-historic  communism, 
and  the  development  of  that  system  of  pro- 
duction established  private   property  and   an 


98  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

individualistic  code  of  ethics  to  replace  that 
of  the  tribe.  The  rise  of  the  feudal  system 
may  be  traced  to  definite  economic  causes  as 
clearly  as  the  rise  of  capitalism  may  be  traced 
to  the  workshop  system  and  its  development  to 
the  great  mechanical  inventions  of  the  eight- 
eenth century.  Just  as  the  term  feudalism 
comprehends  something  more  than  the  eco- 
nomic arrangements  existing  between  lords 
and  serfs,  and  covers  the  whole  social  and 
political  life  of  an  epoch  in  history,  with  its 
military  system,  its  jurisprudence,  its  intellec- 
tual life,  so  the  term  capitalism  comprehends 
much  more  than  a  system  of  wage-paid  labor. 
Constitutional  government,  personal  liberty 
and  freedom  of  contract  are  just  as  essential 
parts  of  capitalism  as  steam  engines,  banking 
and  credit. 

other  factors  I  havc  Said  that  the  distinctive 
not  excluded  f^^tures  of  this  theory  of  social 
evolution,  this  philosophy  of  historical  de- 
velopment, is  that  the  main  determinant  force 
is  economic,  including  in  that  term  all  the 
economic  factors,  including  even  climate. 
Other  forces  enter  into  the  stream  of  causes. 
Religion,  superstition,  custom,  ethics  and  pa- 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  99 

triotism  have  each  exerted  considerable  influ- 
ence, but  when  all  possible  allowance  is  made 
for  these  great  forces  the  sum  of  economic 
conditions  still  remains  the  principal  force 
impelling  the  race-life  onward.  You  will  see 
at  once  that  this  is  very  far  from  being  the 
gospel  of  economic  fatalism  which  it  is  some- 
times caricatured  as  being,  alike  by  superficial 
critics  and  friends.  It  does  not  imply  that 
individuals  are  inspired  solely  by  sordid 
greed,  a  proposition  which  no  one  really  be- 
lieves. It  does,  however,  imply  that  men  gen- 
erally act  in  accordance  with  their  consciously 
felt  interests,  of  which  economic  interests  are 
always  the  most  important  and  urgent.  This 
will  come  to  you  in  your  work  in  the  sphere 
of  philanthropic  endeavor  very  often,  and 
serve  to  explain  w^hy  kind  hearted  men  and 
women  known  to  you  will  oppose  the  meas- 
ures you  are  forced  to  advocate  for  social  bet- 
terment. It  will  help  you  to  understand  why 
a  great  corporation  like  Trinity  Church  owns 
slum  property  and  opposes  tenement  house 
legislation,  and  why  men  and  women  who  are 
known  to  you  as  earnest  Christians  and  most 
generous  persons  will  oppose  measures  aim- 


100  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

ing  to  do  away  with  evils  like  Child  Labor. 
If  you  use  it  wisely  it  will  illumine  for  you 
many  a  page  of  history  which  would  other- 
wise be  obscure,  but  if  you  use  it  fanatically 
and  without  reason  it  will  land  you  in  foolish 
and  untenable  positions. 

Meaning  of  the  So  far  as  we  have  gone  many 
"Trusts"  persons  who  are  not  SociaHsts 
accept  this  theory  of  social  evolution.  One 
need  not  be  a  Socialist  in  order  to  accept  the 
idea  that  history  is  to  a  very  great  extent 
dominated  by  economics.  The  further  con- 
tention of  Socialism  is  that  the  present 
methods  of  wealth  production  and  distribu- 
tion, large  factories  and  great  industrial  and 
commercial  organizations  popularly  called 
"  Trusts,"  make  possible  the  socialization  of 
industry  and  commerce  and,  indeed,  compel 
it.  The  centering  of  wealth,  or  the  control 
of  wealth,  in  relatively  few  hands  tends  to 
focalize  the  resulting  discontent  into  a  move- 
ment aiming  at  the  transformation  of  pri- 
vate or  semi-private  monopolies  into  collec- 
tive monopolies  shared  by  all  the  people 
through  the  instruments  of  democratic  gov- 
ernment.    This,    then,    is   the    philosophy   of 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  Id 

Socialism.  Without  regard  for  other  things, 
such  as,  for  example,  the  theory  of  value  or 
the  science  of  political  economy  in  general, 
a  person  accepting  this  theory  may  be  a  So- 
cialist with  a  perfectly  valid  reason  for  his 
conviction.  If  I  may  be  allowed  to  add  to 
the  number  of  classes  into  which  Socialists 
are  already  classified,  I  should  call  such  a 
person  a  philosophic  Socialist. 
Economies  of  C^)  As  G  systcm  of  poUticd 
Socialism  economy,  Socialism,  like  all  other 
systems  of  political  economy,  concerns  itself 
with  the  laws  goveniing  the  production  and 
distribution  of  wealth.  It  seeks  to  explain 
the  inequalities,  to  show  the  nature  and  origin 
of  what  John  Stuart  Mill  called  "  the  enor- 
mous share  which  the  possessors  of  the  in- 
struments of  industry  are  able  to  take  from 
the  produce."  ^  Indeed,  this  passage  from 
Mill's  great  work  contains  the  germ  of  the 
exploitation  theory  of  value  which  constitutes 
the  cornerstone  of  the  economics  of  modern 
Socialism. 

This  system  of  economics  was  formulated 

^Principles  of  Political  Economy  (1865  Edition),  p. 
477- 


102  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

by  a  brilliant  German  thinker,  Karl  Marx, 
whose  service  to  the  development  of  politi- 
cal economy  have  been  compared  to  those 
which  Darwin  rendered  to  biology,  and  won 
for  him  the  title  of  "  the  Darwin  of  economic 
science."  In  the  brief  time  at  our  disposal 
I  can  only  state  the  principles  of  this  system 
of  economics  in  bare  outline,  unsatisfactory  as 
such  a  statement  must  be. 
Marx  and  Marx  followcd  the  lead  of  all  the 
"labor"  great   English   economists,    Petty, 

Smith,  Ricardo,  Mill,  and  others,  and  ac- 
cepted as  axiomatic  the  principle  common  to 
them  all  that  "  all  wealth  is  produced  by  la- 
bor applied  to  appropriate  natural  objects." 
He  did  not,  as  many  foolish  critics  suppose, 
teach  that  the  mere  expenditure  of  labor  up- 
on natural  objects  must  inevitably  result  in 
the  production  of  wealth.  He  knew  well 
enough  that  if  a  man  spent  his  time  digging 
holes  in  the  ground  and  filling  them  up  again, 
or  dipping  water  from  the  ocean  in  a  bucket 
and  pouring  it  back  again,  that  the  labor  so 
expended  upon  natural  objects  would  not  pro- 
duce wealth  of  any  kind.  Nor  did  Marx 
teach     that     manual     labor    alone    produces 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  IO3 

wealth,  denying  or  ignoring  the  productivity 
of  mental  labor  and  "  directing  genius,"  as 
alleged  by  Mr.  Mallock.  Like  all  the  great 
economists,  he  included  in  the  term  "  labor  " 
the  totality  of  human  energies  expended  in 
production,  regardless  of  whether  those  ener- 
gies are  physical  or  mental.  He  was  not 
foolish  enough  to  believe  that  the  intellectual 
labors  of  the  inventor,  the  designer  and  the 
director  could  be  disregraded.^ 
The  principle  ^o  State  plainly  what  Marx  be- 
Btated  lieved    and   taught,    in   practically 

his  own  words,  will,  I  think,  be  sufficient  to 
destroy  the  whole  fabric  of  Mr.  Mallock's 
labored  and  sophistic  criticism.  Here  is  the 
principle:  Wealth  in  modern  society  con- 
sists of  social  use-values,  of  things  for  which 
there  is  a  demand  giving  them  the  quality  of 
excliangcablcncss.  While,  obviously,  there 
are  many  things  possessing  this  quality  on 
which  little  or  no  labor  has  been  expended, 

1  Here  is  the  definition  of  labor  given  by  Marx: 
"  By  labor  power  or  capacity  for  labor  is  to  be  under- 
stood the  aggregate  of  those  mental  and  physical  capa- 
bilities existing  in  a  human  being,  which  he  exercises 
whenever  he  produces  a  use-value  of  any  description." 
Capital,  vol.  I,  p.  145  (Kerr  Ed.  p.  186). 


I04  MODERN   SOCIALISM 

things  found,  for  instance,  which  possess  al- 
most fabulous  value  because  of  their  rarity, 
they  constitute  an  almost  infinitesmal  part  of 
the  great  business  of  life.  Normally,  the 
business  of  modern  society  is  the  -production 
of  social  use-values,  and  these  are  produced 
by  those  energies  of  hand  and  brain  which 
the  economists  call  labor,  or  productive  effort, 
applied  to  natural  resources.  Such  a  concep- 
tion of  the  meaning  of  the  term  labor  em- 
braces every  contribution  to  the  sum  total  of 
useful  productive  energies  expended,  from  the 
brain  labor  of  the  great  Edison  to  the  hum- 
blest laborer. 
Marx's  contri-  What    Marx    did    which    distin- 

bation  to  the  .    ,  ,  .  . 

theory  guishcs   his   work   m  this    respect 

from  that  of  the  great  economists  who  pre- 
ceded him  was  to  give  scientific  form  to  the 
crude  theory  of  value  which  they  had  de- 
veloped. From  the  central  fact  that  all 
wealth  results  from  the  union  of  natural 
forces  with  those  of  human  intelligence  and 
power,  the  older  economists  had  evolved 
the  simple  labor  theory  of  value,  the  idea  that 
the  amount  of  human  labor  embodied  in  two 
commodities    otherwise    different    determined 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  IO5 

their  relative  economic  value.  It  is  perfectly 
obvious  that  this  conception  of  value  was  most 
defective  and  vulnerable.  If  two  workers  are 
employed  at  making  tables  or  chairs,  for  ex- 
ample, and  one  of  them,  being  a  less  efficient 
worker,  or  using  less  efficient  methods,  tal<:es 
twice  as  long  as  the  other,  there  being  no 
other  appreciable  difference  in  the  tables  ex- 
cept that  the  making  of  one  took  twice  as  long 
as  the  making  of  the  other,  it  would  be  fool- 
ish to  suppose  that  any  person  would  be 
willing  to  pay  twice  as  much  for  the  table 
produced  by  the  inefficient  worker,  or  by  cum- 
bersome methods,  as  for  that  produced  in  less 
time.  If  that  were  so,  we  should  have  in 
economics  a  "  rent  of  inefficiency,"  and  so- 
ciety would  be,  even  though  unconsciously, 
engaged  in  a  great  conspiracy  against  ef- 
ficiency and  progress.  The  advantages  of 
life  would  go  to  the  slow  and  inefficient. 
Averages©-      Marx  saw  the  error  of  the  crude 

daily  neoeH-  ,  111 

sary  labor  thcory,  but  he  also  saw  the  ger- 
minal truth  which  it  contained.  He  realized 
that,  while  the  amount  of  labor  actually  em- 
bodied in  a  single  commodity  could  not  be 
the  determinant  of   its  value,   there  must   be 


I06  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

some  relation  between  the  value  of  commodi- 
ties in  general  and  the  amount  of  labor  spent 
in  their  production.  The  substance  of  his  la- 
bor theory  may  be  simply  stated  as  follows: 
"  The  exchange  value  of  commodities  is  de- 
termined by  the  amount  of  average  labor  at 
the  time  socially  necessary  for  their  produc- 
tion. This  is  determined,  not  absolutely  in 
individual  cases,  but  approximately  in  gen- 
eral, by  the  bargaining  and  higgling  of  the 
market,  to  adopt  Adam  Smith's  well-known 
phrase."  ^  To  explain,  let  us  return  to  our 
example  of  the  men  making  tables :  If  the 
slower  methods  are  those  usually  employed, 
and  the  time  taken  by  the  slower  worker  is 
the  average  time,  the  speed  of  the  other 
worker  and  his  methods  being  wholly  excep- 
tional, then  the  exchange-value  of  tables  gen- 
erally will  be  determined  by  that  standard, 
and  the  worker  adopting  the  more  efficient 
methods  will  be  able  to  get  the  same  price  for 
his  tables,  and,  because  he  can  produce  twice 
as  many  in  a  given  time  as  can  be  produced 
under  the  old,  slow  methods,  he  will  be  in  a 

1  c.f.  Socialism,  a  Summary  and  Interpretation  of  So- 
cialist Principles,  by  John  Spargo,  p.  196. 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  IO7 

position  of  great  advantage  over  his  competi- 
tors. But  competition  tends  to  bring  about 
the  adoption  of  the  most  efficient  methods, 
and  when  they  become  general  the  exchange- 
value  of  tables  is  determined  by  them  instead 
of  the  older,  cumbersome  and  inefficient 
methods.  Then  the  worker  who  keeps  to  the 
old  ways  is  left  behind  in  a  position  of  great 
economic   disadvantage. 

Marx  did  more  than  place  the  la- 

Sarplns-Value    ,  ,  ,         , 

Dor  theory  of  value  upon  a  scien- 
tific basis.  He. went  further  and  showed  hozv 
the  owners  of  the  instruments  of  industry 
obtained  the  "  enormous  share  "  of  the  pro- 
duce which  Mill  noticed.  He  developed  his 
famous  theory  of  "surplus-value"  (nichr- 
werth)  to  explain  the  methods  by  which  the 
exploitation  of  the  producers  is  accomplished. 
This  is  done  through  the  medium  of  wages. 
Under  the  methods  of  production  prevailing 
during  the  era  of  capitalism,  it  is  impossible 
to  determine  the  product  of  the  individual 
worker.  Instead,  therefore,  of  each  man  pro- 
ducing as  an  individual  and  selling  his  own 
product,  we  have  masses  of  workers  employed 
at  a  given  wage  for  a  given  number  of  hours, 


I08  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

the  product  belonging  to  the  employer.  The 
employer  buys  their  labor-power  as  he  would 
buy  any  other  commodity,  at  a  price  tending 
to  the  cost  of  its  production,  i.e.,  the  main- 
tenance of  the  workers  and  their  families, 
fluctuating  according  to  the  relation  of  the 
supply  of  labor-power  to  the  demand  for  it. 
The  law  of  ^^  ^^  sometimies  contended  that 
"'ages  wages    depend    upon    the   produc- 

tivity of  labor,  the  amount  of  value  produced, 
but  this  is  not  at  all  the  case.  Doubtless  the 
bald  statement  that  the  amount  of  a  worker's 
wages  is  not  decided  mainly  by  the  value  of 
his  product,  will  prove  surprising  to  many. 
The  capitalist  teachers  of  political  economy 
and  the  capitalist  press  have  long  taught 
otherwise.  But  here  are  two  instances,  and 
it  would  be  easy  to  multiply  them  a  thousand- 
fold, which  prove  the  assertion. —  In  the  re- 
ports of  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission 
some  very  interesting  figures  are  given  which 
the  workers  are  not  so  familiar  with  as  they 
ought  to  be.  For  instance,  we  find  that  in 
1902  there  were  employed  upon  the  railroads 
of  this  country  1,179,460  workers,  exclusive 
of   all   officials   from   the  grade   of   Division 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  IO9 

Superintendent  upward,  with  a  wage-total  of 
$653,447,162  —  or  an  average  per  employe  of 
$554.02.  In  1897,  the  number  of  employes 
was  814,756,  and  their  total  wages  amounted 
to  $416,609,616  —  or  an  average  of  $548.15. 
So  that  in  the  five  years  the  average  increase 
per  head  was  just  i  per  cent.  But  in  the 
same  period  the  profits  rose  from  $369,565,- 
009  in  1897,  to  $610,131,520  in  1902  —  an 
increase  of  65  per  cent.  Thus,  while  profits 
increased  to  the  extent  of  65  per  cent,  wages 
increased  only  i  per  cent.  Even  stronger  evi- 
dence is  afforded  by  the  U.  S.  Census  Re- 
ports. We  find  from  these  that  in  the  year 
1890  the  average  wages  per  worker  amounted 
to  $445  per  year.  The  total  value  of  the  pro- 
duct per  worker  was  $842.  In  1900,  the  av- 
erage product  per  worker  had  risen  to  $872, 
but  the  average  wages  had  fallen  to  $437. 
That  means  that  each  worker  produced  on  an 
average  $30  more  wealth,  but  received  eight 
dollars  less  wages!  Producing  more  wealth, 
we  receive  less  wages ! 

sarpia«-vaiue  ^ow  thcu,  the  cmploycr  buys  la- 
expiained  bor-powcr,  raw  materials,  and 
machinery.     The  raw  materials  are  used  up 


no  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

in  the  product,  simply  changed  in  form.     It 
is  obvious  that  they  cannot  create  anything. 
The  machinery  is  also  used  up,  but  less  slowly. 
It  is  obvious  that  no  machinery  adds  to  itself, 
or  to  anything,  being  inanimate.     It  is  only  a 
complex  tool  used  to  effect  the  transformation 
of   the    raw    materials.     The    labor-power    is 
also  used  up,  but,  unlike  the  other  things,  in 
the  process  of  being  used  up  it  adds   to  its 
own  value  by  creating  new  value.     Thus,   if 
$i,ooo  w^orth  of  raw  materials  are  used  up 
in  a  week,  together  with  $i,ooo  worth  of  la- 
bor-power   (the  amount  of  the  wages  paid) 
and  $ioo  worth  of  machinery  and  plant,  we 
have  a  total   value   of  $2,100.     Now   if   the 
value  of  the  product  resulting  is  found  to  be 
$2,600,    it    is    clear    that    the    workers    have 
created  $500  worth  of  value  for  which  they 
have   received   no    equivalent.     This    unpaid- 
for  labor  Marx  called  "  surplus  value."     To 
obtain    this    surplus   the    capitalist    goes    into 
business.     It   is  his  source  of  income.     It  is 
divided,  of  course,  in  various  ways,  not  go- 
ing,  necessarily,   to  the   individual   employer. 
How   it  is  divided   is  of  no  moment  to  the 
worker.     The   main    divisions   are    (i)    rent, 


MODERN   SOCIALISM  III 

(2)  interest  on  borrowed  capital,  (3)  employ- 
ers' profits, 

Logic  of  the      To   combine   for   the   purpose   of 
theory  preserving   their   interests   is   nat- 

ural, alike  for  producers  and  exploiters.  Those 
who  accept  this  theory  of  the  exploitation  of 
labor  and  believe  that  the  workers,  being  vastly 
more  numerous  than  the  capitalists,  will  find  a 
means  of  ending  the  system  of  exploitation  by 
transforming  the  great  private,  or  quasi-pri- 
vate, industrial  and  commercial  monopolies 
into  social  or  collective  monopolies,  are  So- 
cialists, even  though  they  do  not  accept  the 
philosophical  theory  of  social  evolution  al- 
ready outlined.  You  will  see  that  the  end 
reached  is  the  same  in  either  case.  One  man 
reasons  along  the  lines  of  great  generaliza- 
tions, but  fails  to  accept  the  detailed  analysis; 
another  accepts  the  detailed  analysis  of 
present  facts,  but  rejects  the  broad  generaliza- 
tion, owing  to  the  perspective  with  which  he 
sees  the  various  factors  of  human  progress. 
LimifationH  of  Tlicrc    arc    many    Socialists    who 

the  Murxlun  i         n «-  •  , 

the<jry  Will  agrcc  that  the  Marxian  the- 

ory of  value  must  be  accepted  with  important 
reservations,  such,  for  example,  as  those  con- 


112  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

tained  in  the  so-called  Austrian  theory  of 
final,  or  marginal,  utility.  This  theory,  as  I 
have  tried  to  show  in  one  of  my  books,^  is 
nothing  more  than  the  old  theory  of  supply 
and  demand  determining  value.  Personally, 
I  have  never  been  able  to  regard  these  the- 
ories as  mutually  exclusive.  To  me  they  ap- 
pear to  be  complementary.  Marx  himself  in- 
sisted that  social  use-value  is  essential  to  ex- 
change-value, that  is  to  say  that  the  desire 
of  others  to  possess  it  is  a  condition  which 
must  exist  before  any  article  can  have  any 
value  whatsoever.  This  is  not  a  concession 
of  Marxism  to  its  critics,  but  an  essential 
feature  of  Marxism.  If  a  man  makes 
wooden  shoes  in  New  York  where  they  have 
no  social  use-value  because  nobody  wants 
them,  fur  overcoats  in  Ecuador,  or  straw  hats 
in  the  arctic  circle,  his  labor  may  well  be  as 
vain  as  if  he  were  dipping  water  out  of  the 
ocean  with  a  bucket  and  pouring  it  back 
again.  But  it  is  obvious  that,  whatever  the 
demand  may  be,  it  would  be  impossible  for 
commodities   to   be   exchanged   for   less   than. 

1  Socialism,  a  Summary  and  Interpretation  of  Social- 
ist Principles  (1907). 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  II3 

the  cost  of  their  production  for  any  length 
of  time.  Production  would  be  lessened  until 
the  supply  approximated  the  demand.  Nor, 
in  a  free  market,  under  the  normal  economic 
conditions  to  which  all  economic  laws  must 
apply,  could  they  be  for  long  maintained  at 
a  price  level  greatly  in  excess  of  their  value. 
Scarcity  as  a  O^  coursc,  this  law  of  valuc  ap- 
cause  of  value  pjjgg  ^^  ^|^g  productwu  of  Com- 
modities. There  are  many  things  whose 
value  is  determined  wholly  without  regard  to 
labor  embodied  in  them.  A  picture  by 
Raphael,  for  instance,  a  statue  by  Michael 
Angelo,  or  the  manuscript  of  a  sonnet  by 
Shakespeare,  would  each  possess  a  value  de- 
termined only  by  the  extent  of  the  competition 
for  them  by  wealthy  persons.  Their  scarcity 
makes  them  desirable  to  such  an  extent  that 
some  persons  will  give  immense  sums  for  the 
pleasure  of  owning  them.  This  desirability  is 
what  is  meant  by  the  term  "  final  utility  "  in 
modern  economics.  At  best  it  is  an  obscura- 
tion of  thought,  the  old  terms  of  supply  and 
demand  being  much  more  intelligible. 
inteiieotnai  If  iustcad  of  taking  Raphael's 
products  picture.      Angelo's      marble,      or 


114  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

Shakespeare's  manuscript,  we  take  the  repro- 
ductions of  them  which  are  produced  as  com- 
modities, we  shall  find  that  the  Marxian  the- 
ory holds  good  in  every  particular.  It  may, 
I  think,  be  admitted  by  the  most  rigid  Marxist 
of  us  all  that  the  law  cannot  be  applied  to 
purely  intellectual  products,  such  as  works  of 
art  and  literature,  without  important  modi- 
fications. A  sensational  novel,  produced  in  a 
week,  may  have,  and  often  does  have,  greater 
exchange  value  than  a  work  by  a  great 
thinker  like  Herbert  Spencer,  owing  to  the 
greater  demand.  Other  examples  of  a  like 
nature  will  suggest  themselves. 
Mr.Maiiock's  ^his  is  uot  the  point  raised  by 
argument  y^^^  Mallock,  liowcvcr,  in  his 
elaborate  argument  for  the  recognition  of 
genius,  or  ability,  as  a  "  third  factor  in  pro- 
duction." Mr.  Mallock,  after  falsely  repre- 
senting Marx  as  claiming  that  "  the  only  hu- 
man agency  involved  in  the  production  of 
wealth  is  average  manual  labor/'  ^  proceeds 
to  demolish  the  theory,  under  the  circum- 
stances not   a  difficult  task.     Utterly  uncon- 

1  Mr.  Mallock's  second  lecture  at  Columbia  Univer- 
sity, vide  the  New  York  Times,  February  15,  1907. 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  II5 

scions  that  he  is  merely  repeating  the  old 
arguments  in  support  of  the  supply  and  de- 
mand theory,  he  chooses  as  an  illustration  suf- 
ficient to  annihilate  the  innocent  Socialist  an 
edition  of  a  printed  book.  The  mechanical 
features  of  our  book,  which  is  a  work  of 
genius,  are  similar  to  those  of  "  a  mere  com- 
pilation of  unreadable  nonsense,"  the  labor 
spent  upon  both  is  the  same  in  kind  and 
quality.  What  makes  their  values  different, 
then?  Mr.  Mallock  makes  two  replies  to  this 
question  —  one  of  them,  the  correct  one,  he 
suggests  quite  accidentally  and  unconsciously ; 
the  other,  entirely  wrong  and  unutterably 
foolish,  he  makes  with  evident  deliberation. 
His  formal  answer  is  that  the  value  is  due 
to  the  directing  genius  of  the  author,  but  this 
rests  upon  the  supposition  that  the  work  of 
greater  genius  will  have  the  greater  value, 
whereas  the  facts  are  often  quite  otherwise.  A 
novel  by  Mr.  Meredith,  Mr.  Howells,  or 
Mark  Twain  sells  for  exactly  the  same  price  as 
one  by  Laura  Jean  Libby,  Marie  Corelli,  or 
the  latest  nine  year  old  prodigy  of  the  literary 
world.  Their  commodity  values  are  equal, 
despite   the   fact   that  the   Laura   Jean   Libby 


Il6  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

book   is  of  no   literary  merit  or  importance, 
while  the   book   by   Mr.    Meredith   is   a   per- 
manent enrichment  of  literature. 
Trying  to         Furthcr    than    this,    Laura    Jean 
circle  Libby   or   Marie    Corelli   will   sell 

tens  of  thousands  of  copies  of  their  books 
more  than  Mr.  Meredith  or  Mr.  Howells,  per- 
haps. Browning's  "  Saul "  is  undeniably  a 
greater  poem  than  Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox's 
"  Laugh  and  the  world  laughs  with  you," 
yet  ten  thousand  persons  will  read  the  latter 
for  every  dozen  who  will  read  the  former. 
Fitzgerald's  translation  of  Omar  is  another 
classic  example.  While  mere  doggerel  bal- 
lads sold  by  the  thousand  in  London  streets, 
Fitzgerald's  immortal  work  went  begging. 
To-day,  however,  we  have  forgotten  the 
names  of  the  "  best  sellers,"  just  as  we  have 
forgotten  the  best  sellers  of  half  a  dozen  years 
ago.  If  we  were  to  pin  Mr.  Mallock  down 
to  his  illustration,  we  should  be  able  to  argue 
from  it  with  fair  logic  that  the  relation  of 
genius  to  value  is  entirely  destructive!  Mr. 
Mallock  is,  however,  quite  incoherent,  and  in 
his  incoherence  blurts  out  the  real  solution  of 
his  problem.     In  the  words   "  whether  thou- 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  II 7 

sands  of  people  want  to  read  it  or  nobody  " 
we  find  him  stumbling  over  the  explanation  of 
the  relative  values  of  his  work  of  genius  and 
his  "  compilation  of  unreadable  nonsense  " — 
stumbling  but  unaware  of  the  fact.  It  is  the 
demand  which  gives  the  one  book  value  as 
against  the  other:  it  is  a  social  use-value, 
while  the  other  book,  for  w^hich  there  is  no 
demand,  has  no  value  because  it  has  no  util- 
ity. The  labor  embodied  in  it  is  like  that 
wasted  in  dipping  the  ocean  dry,  or  digging 
holes  merely  to  refill  them.  Like  many  an- 
other critic  of  Marx,  starting  with  a  misrepre- 
sentation of  the  theory  of  value  for  his  pre- 
mise, Mr,  Mallock  gets  nowhere :  he  moves  in 
a  vicious  circle  and  cannot  escape  from  it. 
••  Ability  and  While  Marx,  like  all  the  great 
production  ecouomists,  includcd  the  ability  de- 
voted to  the  direction  of  labor  in  his  use  of  the 
term  labor,  Mr.  Mallock  makes  of  it  an  inde- 
pendent factor.  It  is  his  "  third  factor  in 
production,"  vastly  more  important  than  la- 
bor. He  does  note  the  great  inventions  and 
their  tremendous  influence  on  the  production 
of  wealth,  but  he  does  not  attempt  to  show 
that   the  genius   of  the   inventors   is   not  ex- 


Il8  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

ploited.  With  the  long  list  of  great  inventors 
who  have  died  in  poverty  that  would  have 
been  an  impossible  task.  The  "  ability  "  and 
"  genius  "  which  Mr.  Mallock  exalts  is  noth- 
ing more  than  the  commercial  ability  to  ex- 
ploit labor,  an  ability  based  on  the  possession 
of  the  instruments  of  production,  as  Mill 
showed,  rather  than  any  special  moral  or  in- 
tellectual superiority.  The  genius  of  a  hand- 
ful of  capitalists,  undistinguished  for  anything 
except  the  possession  of  capital,  brought  the 
genius  of  Eli  Whitney  to  hardship  and  suffer- 
ing. 

Socialists  and  Xs)  ^s  a  social  ideal  we  can  only 
ideausm  discuss  Socialism  very  briefly,  hav- 

ing lingered  too  long  with  Mr.  Mallock's 
sophistries.  We  have  seen  that  some  persons 
accept  Socialism  as  a  philosophy  of  social  evo- 
lution without  accepting  its  commonly  ac- 
cepted views  of  political  economy,  while  others 
reach  the  same  goal,  come  to  the  same  posi- 
tion with  regard  to  the  present  problem  of 
society,  as  a  result  of  their  acceptance  of  those 
economic  theories,  though  they  cannot  accept 
the  philosophy  of  social  evolution  which  as- 
cribes a  principal  influence  to  economic  fac- 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  II9 

tors.  Still  Others  there  are  who  arrive  at  the 
goal  by  yet  another  route.  Knowing  or  car- 
ing little  or  nothing  for  theories  of  economics 
or  philosophy,  they  see  the  ills  by  which  man- 
kind is  beset,  the  needless  poverty  amid  vast 
stores  of  wealth,  and  the  strife  and  bitterness 
of  the  struggle  for  gain;  and  contemplating 
these  things  they  accept  Socialism  as  the  great 
gospel  of  human  brotherhood  and  fraternal 
peace.  They  can  understand  clearly  enough 
that  the  Socialists  are  aiming  at  the  removal 
of  the  causes  of  the  ills  they  so  sincerely  de- 
plore, and  embrace  Socialism  as  a  great  social 
ideal,  or  religion,  devoting  themselves  to  it 
with  religious  fervor  and  enthusiasm.  These 
idealist  Socialists  are  sometimes  sneered  at  for 
their  "  sentimentality  "  by  those  whose  lives 
are  dominated  by  the  intellect  rather  than  by 
the  soul,  yet  they  have  their  rightful  place 
among  us.  They  bring  to  the  movement  a 
spiritual  dynamic  of  unquestionable  value. 

"Forhnman       ^^^^^  '^^^Y  ^°'  ^^"^  ^^^   SocialistS  liaVC 

w.ii<iaru>- "  ^j^  i^jg^j  jj^^  soldier  in  the  Paris 
Commune  when  asked  "  What  are  you  fight- 
ing for?"  drew  himself  up  and  answered, 
"  For    human    solidarity."     And    that    same 


I20  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

great  ideal  inspires  the  Socialists  of  the  world. 
To  aim  at  the  abolition  of  needless  poverty 
and  suffering,  the  wars  that  drench  the  world 
with  blood,  the  needless  diseases  that  decimate 
the  race,  the  dominion  of  man  by  man  and 
class  by  class,  so  that  individual  and  collective 
interests  may  at  last  be  harmonized,  is  the 
ideal  which  inspires  even  the  "  crass  mater- 
ialism "  of  the  Socialist  movement  of  which 
you  have  heard  so  much.  I  need  scarcely  say 
here  that  the  Socialist  has  no  desire  to  see 
a  great  bureaucracy  established  for  the  pur- 
pose of  directing  the  life  of  the  people.  Stu- 
pid caricatures  of  a  Socialist  state  attempting 
to  establish  absolute  equality  by  feeding  and 
clothing  all  its  citizens  alike,  crushing  out  in- 
dividual liberty,  attempting  to  pick  out  its  art- 
ists, poets,  inventors  and  philosophers,  erring 
sometimes  and  putting  Shakespeares  and  An- 
gelos  to  dig  ditches,  are  common  enough. 
The  answer  of  the  Socialist  to  such  charges 
as  these  caricatures  imply  is  simple  enough : 
we  want  social  ownership  only  of  those  things 
which  cannot  be  controlled  by  private  owners 
except  as  means  of  exploiting  the  labor  of 
others  and  making  them  bondsmen.     Not  less 


MODERN    SOCIALISM  121 

freedom  for  the  individual,  but  more  —  a  free- 
dom resting  upon  the  right  of  each  child  born 
into  the  world  to  an  equal  chance. 
sociaUsm  not    The  millcnium  of  which  men  have 

aniilleoial  ,  ,       ,  -  111 

dream  dreamed  throughout  all   the  ages 

may  at  last  be  realized.  Centuries,  possibly 
thousands  or  millions  of  them,  may  elapse 
first,  each  age  finding  itself  a  little  nearer  the 
goal.  In  that  Golden  Age  of  Love  and  Peace, 
sorrow  and  pain,  sin  and  folly,  tears  and  harsh 
words  may  be  unknown,  but  Socialism  does 
not  concern  itself  with  that  millenial  perfec- 
tion. It  is  a  gospel  for  to-day.  Its  message 
to  the  America  of  the  twentieth  century  is  sim- 
ply this :  "  Let  us  unite  to  secure  the  greatest 
social  advantage  from  the  long  centuries  of 
social  experience  and  effort,  conscious  that  the 
highest  and  best  interest  of  each  individual 
will  be  served  thereby." 

Parable  of  the  ^  closc  with  a  little  parable  which 
'***  I  read  or  heard  somewhere  many 

years  ago.  In  a  schoolroom  a  wise  teacher 
placed  a  beautiful  rose  to  brighten  the  day  for 
her  children.  Soon,  the  boys  and  girls  began 
to  clamor  for  the  rose,  each  begging  the 
teacher   for   the   sole  possession   of  it.     "  To 


122  MODERN    SOCIALISM 

give  it  to  any  one  boy  or  girl  would  be  unjust 
to  all  the  others,"  said  the  teacher.  "  Besides, 
it  would  be  unwise,  for  whoever  obtained  it 
could  not  possibly  get  more  of  its  beauty  than 
now.  I  cannot  divide  it,  for  if  I  do  the  rose 
will  be  destroyed  and  each  child  will  have  a 
worthless  petal  only,  there  will  be  no  rose. 
Together,  we  can  each  enjoy  it;  in  a  real  sense 
each  of  us  owns  the  rose."  Social  property 
is  like  that.  It  cannot  be  owned  by  any  in- 
dividual without  robbing  all  other  individuals ; 
it  cannot  be  divided  without  ruin.  Yet  each 
individual  can  own  the  whole  of  its  real  util- 
ity and  enjoy  its  full  benefits. 


This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last 
date  stamped  below 


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